


okay.

by petalhwas



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Coming of Age, Domestic, Fake Dating, Fake Relationship, Fluff, Gay, I think?, M/M, Maybe some angst, Slow Burn, Take this as a joke, Teenagers, Woosan, kinda don’t like each other at the beginning, light brown hair choi san, like the snails they really, no i'm not, nothing nsfw, san is shy, seongsang, smh, snail’s pace, soft, sorry - Freeform, there are no fake dating aus on this mf site, we going back there, wooyoung's a little asshole, yungi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-01-13 16:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 57,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18472480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petalhwas/pseuds/petalhwas
Summary: “you’re gonna give him a heart attack. san dating your brother? that's insane.”...things never go according to plan. typical.





	1. moms these days, am i right?

**Author's Note:**

> hehe hey guys i'm back
> 
> this is my first ever work for ateez, so please bear with me! originally, i was going to work on the demon au, bUT i wanted to do something a little more domestic first and there aren't many fake dating aus on here and i wanna know what the heck is up with that
> 
> but here it be
> 
> i'm so d*rn excited for this one! hopefully you guys like it and i don't disappoint,, just because i need to have a cliche fake dating trope in my works somewhere c:
> 
> sooo here's a premature beginning of a fic that i literally spent all day and past my bedtime writing instead of doing my homework,,,, my eyes are going in and out of brightness and it's 1am on a school night my mom's gonna kill me 
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> p.s. i switched ages and such up a little bit:
> 
> everyone is in that 17-18 age range, with san/jongho and wooyoung on the brink of 18 and 20 respectively, and yunho/jongho and yeo/woo are brothers just because why not you know
> 
> p.p.s. i’m trying to be more descriptive when i write,,, we’re reading a book in english class called f451 and literally every other sentence is imagery or metaphors or similes or what not so my bad if it’s too much shsjsjsj if it is pls feel free to tell me! ik it’s not that deep it’s just ff but i’m just adding more stuff like that to what i usually do bc apparently people like that!

_hello!_

_really quick - this story is completely fictional and meant for entertainment purposes only!_

_everything is entirely made up, and the real-life people that the characters are named after have nothing to do with how they really are. i wrote this solely for your enjoyment (hopefully!) and for me to have something to pass the time with._

_please have fun with this, and thank you for everything!_

__\- mandi_ _

...

There were two things that Choi San could solidly say he was sure about in his lifetime.

One, that he had an unhealthy obsession with playing Undertale in the first blush hours of the day that he forgot existed until he checked his analog clock and sees the time is 2,3,4 in the morning and he has to force himself to stop petting the lesser dog and go to sleep.

And two, that he likes boys. He feels like he has to censor the word every time he thinks about it, like if he spoke it out loud he would just hear one big, loud BLEEP, and it would scare him and throw off his whole train. He thinks about the feeling and thoughts that weren’t really _supposed_ to happen, but they did anyway and San chose to be okay with that. Being raised in a household where, whenever the topic of the g-word came up, it would amount for uncomfortable silences and unwanted talks of religion and weird references to the Bible that San didn’t even know were in there.

And San wants to know what the fuck was up with that.

He’d been thinking like this for a while now, though. Thinks about the what-ifs and possiblys of him actually, maybe coming out to his mom. Would it be awkward? Would it make her kick him out? San was a whole seventeen years old, and he knows that the world wouldn’t wait for him to do it. He couldn’t put it on pause and think for a few more days, because he knows that the sun still sets orange and pinks and brings out the stars and the violets of nighttime. He knows that people are still counting down the clock to their last breaths, he knows that babies are still being born somewhere on Earth and crying and people are still getting married and _still_ crying.

He knows that the world isn’t going to stop for him, otherwise, he’d be thinking about it until he was old and wrinkly and he couldn’t see at all in one eye and he had white hair on his head.

So he decided to roll with it.

When San comes out to his mom, they’re driving down the freeway back from a small road trip to go see their relatives that San didn’t know the names of half, and it’s dark and he should have been on the verge of tipping over the cliff that was sleep deprivation, as they’d been traveling since this morning, but he’d been worrying all day about how he would word it. Should he make a joke of it? Hint at it with random objects in the car so it was less serious? Was that weird?

No, that was weird.

He just outright tells her, keeps his eyes on the uneven placement of the streetlamps giving off an orange, invasive glow that made him feel like it really was just the two of them in the entire world driving down this freeway, and she giggles at him and said simply “okay”, as if it was a cute inside joke between the two of them that he was bringing up again and telling her not to forget.

But it was enough for him.

It made him feel odd, like the static in the television replaced the very essence of his being, with the way she quirked her eyebrows, and San could barely see because she had to keep her eyes on the road and the streetlamps were projecting obscure shadows onto her face that ultimately could have given off the wrong impression and he felt like he needed to cry. And with the way she said it, like when he used to beg for her to buy him a toy as a child and she said _okay,_ and then forgot to buy it. Like the _okay_ she would say to him when he’s giving a half-assed argument on why he should miss school the next day because _it would allow for chances to get more sleep, and studies show that a brain functions better when the body gets more rest._ She would reply with that “okay”, and just when San thinks he had her in the bag, she woke him up early when he knows he never set his alarm to wake up for school.

But it had been enough for him.

When San comes out to his mom again, it’s on a rainy, Sunday night, and it was only because the first “okay” wasn’t enough for _her,_ and she had been asking him about a girlfriend earlier that day.

San didn’t have one of those, and his mom _knew_ that he didn’t have one of those, but she really, really wanted him to.

And when he explains to her that he didn’t - hours later when the sun had taken the conversation they had and stored it within its own memories to the extent of his mom nearly forgetting about it - she’d enclosed him in a little room of her trust and flashed a table lamp of guilt in his face, and he found himself telling her again, this time, adding in the fact that he has a boyfriend to prove it.

San didn’t have one of those, either.

He shows up wet and sodden and really cold at Yeosang’s window that night, crossed the big tree conveniently placed between their two neighboring houses, the want to stay in his own home completely gone, replaced by the want to seclude himself in the confines of Yeosang’s room and hide from all the thoughts that San can’t help but think about next to a warm body of support and inviting arms and kisses to foreheads and baked cookies that he’d found in the back of the fridge for him.

He decides that she pretended not to hear him that night, and that maybe he'd try again. 

Maybe.


	2. yeosang, with love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello this has a bunch of kudos and hits already and it makes me wanna do better,,, thank you guys :(((((
> 
> enjoy, please!

And now, here he was, haphazardly having an in-game conversation with Sans (who he took an immediate liking to, didn’t know if it was because of his sense of humor or _what_ ) on Yeosang’s small, hand-me-down television monitor, tangled up in his sheets, while Yeosang sprawled himself at his feet and bent his back over the edge of the bed, typing away in his phone - probably to the group chat.

The two of them were good at being each other’s company - just being together - even if that meant no talking and just listening to the other breathe, or to the keyboard taps on Yeosang’s phone (that he, admittedly, kept too loud most of the time), or listening to the rustling of feet in the sheets when a leg fell asleep or someone needed to move. San listens closely today, listens to the keyboard taps and looks at Yeosang’s calm state, and tries to match his breathing with the way his chest was rising and falling, and soon he feels his own eyelids beginning to fall heavy, even with the cheery Snowdin theme melody from the screen.

Yeosang stops texting for a moment, feels San’s eyes sitting on him, their weight a little too heavy for just looking.

“How’s the mom situation?” Yeosang asks suddenly, glances at him once and goes back to his phone, but it was enough to pierce San’s train of thought like a silver needle, and he's awake again, sighing and shaking his head once the question registered, trying to find concentration in the white pixelated dialogue of the game.

Yeosang knew San like the back of his hand, probably better than he knew himself. They’ve been best friends since before they could even speak. Sometimes San likes to sit on his bed in his room when he’s bored and think about the memories of their childhood together, opens up his heart like an old, worn out book, and reads the pages and smiles. Yeo knew exactly how San was feeling just by how he speaks, knows him from the things he liked and disliked, knew him from the type of clothing style he would wear down to how he liked his coffee. San found comfort in the fact that maybe he has someone that knows him enough to not ask how’s he’s doing when he would much rather be left alone, and to just pick him up and go get yogurt smoothies together. Yeosang loved all of his friends, put himself into his heart and then gave a piece of it to each of them, loved like it was nothing, like spare change to a beggar’s cup. It was nothing.

San loved Yeosang.

And with the way San was keeping quiet, still hadn’t explained that one night when he came to his house all wet and silent, as if bringing in the outside storm into his house along with a whirlwind and tornadoes and the Catatumbo lightnings following his trail, he knows something is wrong.

“It’s okay.”

He lies through his teeth, because quite frankly, it _wasn’t_ that okay, and the more he thinks about his okay the more he thinks about his mom’s okay, and _god,_ he wished that word hadn’t existed.

_Okay, okay, okay._

He changes the HDMI to cable, wanting something other than that _fucking_ Snowdin theme, and it’s right back to the cartoons that Yeosang had been so fond of. He, too, but nobody needed to know that.

Yeosang sits up slowly, the blood drained to his head giving him a little headache when he does, but he opts for leaning against his walls painted light mint green instead. San has commented on the color choice, once, only to be told that he’d been too lazy to repaint it the color he really wanted and left it.

“Talk to me, San, stop zoning out,” Yeosang tilts his head a little, and the way his eyebrows raise just slightly in curiosity and has that tiny smile on his lips that gives San the push to actually open his mouth and tell him how bad he really felt about the situation, makes him want to sigh.

And he does, out loud, again.

Yeosang’s eyes are bright in what little sunlight is peeking through the transparent, glittery curtains he has over his single window, glinting off the stray, silvery, specks and casting disco ball glints across his face. San leans up against the headboard of Yeosang’s bed, and he looks at his sock covered feet, one sock striped black and red with a little cherry in the middle, the other bilgy grey.

He remembers when it was white.

“I told her again. She didn’t believe me, so...so I said I had a boyfriend.” San plays with a stray thread from Yeosang’s down comforter, too preoccupied (and frankly, too embarrassed about it) to look Yeosang in his eyes.

To look him in his eyes that he knew would speak of silence, yet scream so loud at him to just _be honest._

There was a moment of stillness between the two, save for an ad speaking on the monitor television about a new brand of deodorant that San knew too well, enough to completely block it out, since he heard it on every other channel. He listens this time, though, glancing once to the grit in between the tiles of Yeosang’s floor and thinking about the sweat-protection the deodorant offered, before going back to the thread.

“Well, _do_ you have a boyfriend, San?”

 _“No!_ That’s the issue. She invited him to come over for dinner next Saturday. What if she asks to meet his mom? What if she wants him to bring a...bring a _pie_ or something? I fucked up, Yeo.” San shakes his head again, flicking his tongue over his lips that have gone dry hours ago, but he had nothing else to do besides think, “Can I just live here? I’ll sleep under your bed so I don’t take up any space.”

Yeosang makes a face from his spot in the corner of the bed, and he could see it in his side peripherals. “San, that’s gross. There’s probably dust under my bed. You’re allergic to dust bunnies, you’d die.” 

Oh, yeah. Dust bunnies.

San finds it funny how Yeosang’s looking at the problem here as being the dust bunnies rather than the two inches of space between the floor and his bed.

“This isn’t as bad as you think. I’ll pretend to be your boyfriend.” Yeosang offers, because out of the many times San has come to him with stories and dilemmas, this was the one situation where he didn’t have any good answers for him, so he just blurts out the first somewhat solution he thinks of, though he knows that it wouldn’t work, not at all.

“That would never work. My mom knows you all too well. I just go up to her one day and say ‘Hey mom, remember Yeosang? He’s gay, too, and also my boyfriend, as in, the boy I told you about’?” San lightens his voice and does a lot of head movements that look like he’s hyped up on the special powder that they offer at rich-people high school parties, and has Yeosang making a face and grimacing, a smile breaking through his features.

“Ew, why do you sound like that?” He asks, giggling softly and San goes back to looking at the thread from the comforter, smiling a little himself. He sounded as ridiculous as he felt.

“Look, just tell her you guys have been dating for a week. That’s _way_ too early to be meeting parents,” Yeosang crawls over to San, San's body moving slightly with the dips of his hands and knees in the mattress, and rests his head on his lap, adjusting a bit, because that wall was beginning to be too much on his spine and he liked laying on San.

His go-to method of naps, most of the time.

“I told her we’ve been going out for three months. That’s a long time. That’s enough time to meet parents. You’ve ever seen The Parent Trap?” San doesn’t really have anywhere else to put his hands, so he has them in yeosang’s hair, gently tugging at a few light brown strands that looked really pretty in the sunlight from what he remembers during their times outside. “Hey, you ever think of dyeing your hair?”

“San, don’t try to change the subject. That movie has absolutely nothing to do with meeting parents. I think you’re just being dramatic.” Yeosang says, and San deflates, arms going slack by his side and spine curving as he rests his head against the mint colored walls that he commented on before, because he _was_ being dramatic, but what else could he do to fix this?

Nothing.

He feels a finger poking lightly and intrusive on his cheek, and he looks down at Yeosang, entertaining himself looks like, just laying there and poking San’s cheek, not having to be stuck in the middle of a situation so stupid.

“San~. I’ll pretend date you~.” His voice was too deep for the way he was sing-song talking to him, but San still found it endearing that he was trying, so he had to give him that.

“It’s not gonna work, Yeo. Besides, Seonghwa would want to kill me. I can’t fight Hwa! I’ll have to live out my days as a straight.” San rubs at his eye, suddenly itchy, and then he remembers that there are mites in his eyelashes and it’s probably them being little assholes.

He rubs a little harder.

Yeosang giggles again, and this time brings two fingers up to San’s cheeks, poking both of them at the same time, as if he was some foreign sea creature washed up on the beach that he just _had_ to bother with a stick, trying to pull him out of his thoughts or _something_ to wipe that pout off of his lips.

“Come on, it’s not all bad. you have one more year with her until you move out.” Yeosang gently pinches San’s cheeks in between his forefingers and thumbs, stinging his skin a bit, “Then, you could fuck all the boys you want!”

“Yeosang!” San’s eyes widen at that, and his cheeks splash ruby. “Isn’t your mom downstairs? And your brother down the hall?”

Yeosang simpers, one that has his eyes smiling too as he looks up at San, gleaming with a tinge of a kid possessed by the skill of mischief.

“Yes.”

“Can we just forget about this whole thing, and go out for yogurt smoothies instead?” San asks, and Yeosang nods, shrugging.

“We’re not going to forget about this, but alright. Do you want me to tell the others? It could be a big party.” Yeosang lights up at being around his friends again, “A big, yogurt smoothie party.”

San scrunches his nose at that. _Yogurt smoothie party._

“Tell them. Maybe they could help. Better than you,” San gently pushes Yeosang’s head with a beam, and he swats his hand away with a smile.

“Impossible. Our friends are trash when it comes to advice.”

...

And Yeosang was correct.

When all five of them: Yeosang, San, Mingi, Hongjoong, and Seonghwa, are sitting at a big bench table underneath a dirty umbrella that San was sure had dead bugs entangled in spider webs at the very top of it, San delivers his problem, and Yeosang delivers his solution.

“It could work. If Yeosang has met your mom already, what’s the issue?” Hongjoong says, hearing, but not really listening to the severity of it, using his straw to stir his smoothie around, as if it would give it more flavor or a better consistency.

“Hey, is this color green or blue?” Mingi softens his voice and lightly pats Seonghwa’s arm as if it would make San not notice him, and Seonghwa gives him a look for asking a question in a time like this, but he raises his eyebrows once he looks at his smoothie and sees the hue that so greatly peaked Mingi’s interest.

“Green, to me.” Hwa shrugs, and then goes back to his smoothie and the conversation as if he was actually paying attention, straw between his pointer and middle finger as he looks at San to keep talking, but he’d stopped a while ago.

“That’s blue. Predominantly blue, with hints of green. You’re blind.” Mingi says, and Hongjoong shakes his head, reaching across Seonghwa to point at the contents of the cup, arguing that it’s a _sea green, and the sea is blue but it’s not called sea blue so it’s green,_ and soon the three of them looked like clueless, steel-headed scientists trying to figure out what name the chemicals in a beaker that someone had mixed together on a whim should be called, a breakthrough.

San looks at Yeosang, deadpanned, and he shrugs, sipping on his smoothie and watching the three of them across the bench. It's only when they start getting into a conversation about a candy boy named Yunho, a boy that Mingi took a liking to the way he dressed and smiled and his hair and his eyes (but from what San could hear, this Yunho sounded like literally every other boy that went to their high school), that Yeosang turns to San, throwing one leg over and straddling the bench seat.

“Hey, what about my brother? He could be your pretend boyfriend.” Yeosang perks up, and San sees a little notification banner pop up on Yeosang’s phone screen and assumes that the boy in question made himself known from a text.

But San declines.

“Hell no. Your brother doesn’t know me. I don’t know your brother like that. Plus, he’s way out of my league.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve known my brother since you’ve known me. What’s wrong with him? Do you hate my brother?” Yeosang makes a face to where his eyebrows knit together, pulling his lips so that his cheeks jut out, and San's eyes widen again.

“ _No!_ Stop putting words in my mouth!” San smoothes two hands over his cheeks to try and block him from seeing his flushed face, hot like a preheating stove, and Yeosang giggles because he knew it was easy to fuck with San but he didn’t know it was _this_ easy.

“You’re gonna give him a heart attack. San dating your brother? That’s insane.” Seonghwa suddenly gets involved in the conversation, sipping his smoothie but he was nearly finished and it makes a weird slurping sound after a few seconds, like the toilet when you flush it.

Seonghwa was right. San’s seen Wooyoung many times before, but he was older than both Yeosang and San and he stopped hanging out with them a while ago. He hasn’t talked to him since, save for the few yes or nos when he asked if they wanted for him to get food for them and their mom wasn’t home.

Wooyoung was intimidating.

No, more than that.

San thinks of him as the deep, freezing, quiet parts of the Dead Sea, or maybe like intermittent space, where you knew about the few popular constellations and planets and solar systems that aligned together, but you also knew that there were more galaxies out there that nobody bothered to explore, yet. Wooyoung was like the sun, and everyone and everything else was around his orbit. They were there, but nobody could really get to Wooyoung. Like the nighttime stars and the twinkles that you never see because you’re sleeping, or the scary underwater monsters that you haven’t seen yet, but you know it’s there. Wooyoung was just that.

He was _there._

San wasn’t there yet himself, and for him to go into Wooyoung’s orbit, some stupid, foreign planet circling loosely around him and trying to peek at what the sun really was, was not it for him. He thinks of all the stars in Wooyoung’s eyes, thinks of the chandeliers in his voice and the daffodils that took a liking to his button nose and fixated a little under his eyes that showed more clearly in the winter, and he grows sick.

He doesn’t want to explore that.

“Yeo, I think that’s worse than your idea before. Me and your brother don’t talk. I don’t want to do that.” San’s pulled back into his environment when he wants to, pulled himself back into consciousness about how cold his yogurt smoothie was in his hands.

“Doesn’t matter. That’s actually better, because you don’t need to spend more time with him that you don’t want to. I’m texting him, right now.” Yeosang says, and San listens to the all too loud keyboard clicks of his phone and focuses on Yeosang's breathing again rather than his own.

“Yeosang, please don’t. If you do, I’ll blackmail you.” It’s an empty threat, and to be honest it was pretty mean, but Yeosang laughs and shakes his head.

“Then ask him yourself.” Yeosang says, looking up at San with daring eyes, and soon Mingi and Hongjoong were watching him, putting him in the spotlight and he’s nervous.

“N-no. No.” San shakes his head, looks at his lap again and plays with his clammy fingers, "Let me think."

“I’m gonna text him,” Yeosang has his phone out again and San hears the keyboard clicks and he swallows dry, like a fish out of water when he looks at his friend.

“ _Fuck,_ fine. Fine, I’ll ask him myself. Don’t text him.”

“ _Okay,_  San.”

_Okay. Okay._

Okay.


	3. beanbag balls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello this chapter feels kinda weird but pls enjoy anyway!
> 
> edit as of 5.31: GOOD GOD IM SO EMBARRASSED YALL LET ME START W “TWO DAYS LATER, APPROXIMATELY 25 HOURS” TWO DAYS IS AT LEAST 48 I CANT BELIEVE THIS IM SCREAMING

Two days later, approximately forty-nine hours because San had been counting (not the seconds or the minutes, but the hours, so he didn’t spend _too_ much time worrying about it), he’s back in Yeosang’s room, who’d been fretting over San sitting on the bean bag in the corner of his room with the looming threat of more dust bunnies hiding in the corner behind him, but San feels like there’s a bigger problem at hand here. He wore something different today, something a little weird to him but made Yeosang gush about how cute he looked when he showed up at his doorstep. He normally would stick with dark, woodsy colors - blacks, greys, browns - to keep himself invisible, at school and at home. And he keeps contacts in, so people don’t know how badly he can’t see, but today he wore his specs.

But if you asked if he got dressed up for this special occasion, he would tell you no.

“Okay, San, we’re here on a mission,” Yeosang tells him, once he starts Undertale on his television, and San envisions the two of them in a tightly secured bank and the money was right inside that steel door down the hallway and a few steps to the left, and it would be too heavy for San to move once he gets up there.

San starts to think that maybe he’s being too dramatic.

“Yeosang, this is a bad idea. A very terrible, terrible idea. Who came up with this idea?” San asks, like a running faucet, playing with the little balls of styrofoam beneath the black fabric of the bean bag underneath him, squishing one in between his forefinger and thumb, hearing it crack like knuckles under the pressure.

San thinks he’s going to crack under pressure. He’s going to crack under the pressure of Wooyoung’s thumb and forefinger and _god,_ this was such a bad idea.

“I did. This idea is not bad. It’ll work, dummy. Stop being so scared. Don’t you believe in taking risks?” Yeosang glances at him, clearly not as worried over this as San is, controller in hand as the Snowdin theme breaks through the stress clogging San’s head.

San shakes his head no. “I have no beliefs. The Easter Bunny? Tooth fairy? Fake. I only know facts. And the fact of the matter is that I’m going to make a fool of myself in front of your brother and then I’ll have to run away from the neighborhood and never come back. Go run away and live in Ethiopia.”

San cracks another one.

Yeosang giggles at how he was acting, putting the controller to the side and resting a hand on one of the holes of his jeans, bringing that leg up to rest on his mattress.

“What, are you scared of him? He’s only two years older than us, barely.”

“That’s two years too many. And even if it’s just not two years yet, there’s still a year on top of us. I’ve never dated anyone before. He’s going to think I’m an idiot.”

Another one.

“San, when I tell you my brother doesn’t give two hot shits about anything, I mean it. He does _not_ give two hot shits about anything.” Yeosang says, but San focuses on the pixel character and 8-bit music coming from the television monitor - something he’s already seen a bunch of times, but couldn’t get sick of it.

He’s sick right now, but the music was okay.

“What if he says no?” San asks, and the scenarios are playing in his head again and his heart is thumping in his throat and _god, this was such a bad idea._

“Then he says no, and we’ll have to find a random guy off of the street for you, and maybe then, that guy will say yes. There’s the one that works at the petrol station that we ran into once. With the hole.”

San makes a noise like blowing through a party horn with a hole in it, and leans his head back until it lands with a thud against the light mint green walls of Yeosang’s bedroom, and it kind of stirs him and stings a little on the shape of his skull, but he pretends it didn’t hurt and shuts his eyes.

“Just go. You’re making this into a big deal, I’m telling you. Think of it as the betterment of your wellbeing. Now, hurry up, so that we could go hang out with the others.”

Okay, he was on a time limit. Okay, okay.

“Fine, _fuck_.”

San gets up out of the beanbag chair, but he does it slowly because he needs to buy himself some time about what to say.

How he should word it?

If he was being honest, all of the scenes that he was still playing in his head were all damaging to his self esteem with their outcomes, and he feels sick yet again, like that time where he had to present his research project for his science class and he choked in front of everyone and the mean people that usually sit in the back were laughing at him.

He cringes.

San rolls his shoulders back once, feels the small bones in his neck and spine crack like popcorn and change positions a little and he feels a bit better.

Weirdly jelly-like in the middle of his back, but better.

Yeosang gets up to go help him because he knows San had the courage of that pink cartoon dog he liked to watch on tv, and places his hands on his shoulders. San takes it as Yeosang putting propellers on his back, and he finally starts the engine and moves his boat, but he only gets halfway through the hallway ocean when he turns back to go back into Yeosang’s room.

“Yeosang, I can’t do it. Please don’t make me do it.” His valor was quickly draining out, like he had a leak in his fuel tank, and before he knew it, he’s running on empty and he wants to go back into Yeosang’s room, maybe try it again in a few hours.

Yeosang shoves him away from the door anyway, shutting it as quickly as he could, and now, San was in the dark, all the lights in the hallway off.

“Go. Don’t be lame. You look cute. If it makes you feel better, if I was Wooyoung, I would think you were less ugly than I usually do.” His voice is muffled behind the door, and San knows he’s got his ear pressed to it so he could hear him.

“Yeosang, really? That makes it worse.” San whispers harshly, afraid that his voice would carry into Wooyoung’s room and he would know what he’s about to do.

“Just go!”

San sighs, yet finds it within himself to turn around, and he’s right at the shore, now. His legs feel like driftwood, slowly carrying him down the hall on autopilot. He gets further, until, _finally,_  he’s in front of Wooyoung’s door, the nerves constricting his throat and threatening to smother him, to freeze him up and stop him from doing what he’s here for.

His hand feels like a brick, and when he curls his fingers into a fist and brings it up to the steel wooden bank door, he brings it down too loudly the first time and winces as if he felt the pain that the door did, and he knocks lightly the next three times, in apology for slamming his fist down. Hopefully, he didn’t scare Wooyoung.

That would be embarrassing.

He keeps his hand in a fist when he lets it go back to his side, and there’s a light, nervous sweat creeping into the crevices of his hands and he flexes it out to air dry them because he didn’t want to see Wooyoung with wet hands.

That would be even _more_ embarrassing.

“Go inside. He’s sleeping.” Yeosang whispers, as if his voice would carry and slither underneath Wooyoung’s door and into his blankets and into his ears and stab his brain.

San startles and looks at him with wide eyes, didn’t even notice he opened the door a little and had his head poking out, watching him. San goes to say something but opts for shaking his head quickly, and Yeosang is quiet. San looks over to him for help on what to do next, for a joke, for _something_ to fill the silence between the two - well, three - of them, but Yeosang shakes his head and steps back, shutting the bedroom door in front of him again.

Yeosang had let him fall into a patch of cold water, and he was frozen and floating, too scared to take a breath and too cold to move.

He cuts off his mind, puts a silver needle through it again and just turns the knob, letting it open by itself and listening to the squeaks of the old hinges. Wooyoung’s room is nearly dark, blackout curtains pulled haphazardly over the glass window, and San could see that his bed was grey, blankets were darker grey, his clothes were black and grey too in his black closet, save for the whites on his black and white converse strewn carelessly to the floor.

His heart is a beating Supersport, almost like it was racing with itself and wanted only him to hear it, so loud in his ears that he couldn’t focus on anything else. His attention is on his heart beats.

One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

And he wonders if this is what the moon felt like once the first man stepped in its craters. He definitely doesn’t want to be here, but he’s on a mission for the _betterment of wellbeing_ , and Yeosang giving him such a stupid reason made him feel...somehow worse. He takes the plunge anyway, lets himself fall headfirst into the dark parts of his Dead Sea, and walks in, and he feels like an alien.

The sheets ruffle, like when San would ruffle his feet in Yeosang’s sheets and he hears that weird sound. There’s a deep breath, like a fire extinguisher over flames, deep and loud, and there’s a body moving in the bed.

Wooyoung’s awake now.

He leans up, rubs at his eyes that San remembers he always thought were pretty, always looked like they were bright with the smiling moon and its stars.

San thinks he likes stars more than the average person. Mingi’s starting to rub off on him.

“Yeosang?” He asks, his voice velvety with sleep, and San stays quiet, stops himself from answering on instinct because that was not his name.

Wooyoung’s like a ghost, like a spirit in the dark, and San feels too scared to try and communicate with such an antipodal body. This was a mistake.

Wooyoung turns on the light, the lamp next to his nightstand releasing dim, dreary warmth into his room, and San can’t take his eyes off of him, because he’s afraid that Wooyoung would see an exposed part of him and care to think about it. Anytime you take your eyes off of something, that something can see your vulnerability, and San had beauty marks on his cheeks and dimples that popped out sometimes and he hated them. San didn’t want Wooyoung thinking about those parts and ask about it because confrontation was never a tool in his arsenal.

Never, ever.

“San? What the hell do you want?”

His words taste like rum raisin, bitter yet smooth and you need to have an acquired taste to it to know if it’s good or not. San didn’t like rum raisin. Not at all.

“I-I need...I’m in a bit of a...of a problem.”

It’s like his lungs were being crushed between his ribs and he could barely breathe with each word. He’s too nervous. He couldn’t have sold, not to Wooyoung’s messy, silver hair against the darkness of his bed, not to Wooyoung’s annoyed expression, and _definitely_ not to Wooyoung’s stare.

_“Okay?”_

Okay, okay.

“I, um,” San flicks a tongue over his lips because they’d gotten dry again, and there’s a second in him that worries if Wooyoung could see the split in the middle before he licks them again.

He looks away from Wooyoung’s eyes because he could see that they were trained on him, his eyebrows holding irritation, but his eyes were gleaming in this dim room. They were gleaming and trailing down to his pants, to his socks that were mismatched again, then back up to his weirdly patterned checkered and striped shirt to the headband under his hair and his specs.

Studying, like San was one of the textbooks stacked neatly in the corner of his black desk.

“I came to ask if you’d...if you’re okay with - and this is gonna sound weird, but, it was Yeosang’s idea - if you’re okay with...p-pretending to be my boyfriend. Just for a day, s-so my mom stops asking me.”

Wooyoung stares at him, brows coming together even closer, and San relaxes his own from their worried and stressed out state when he remembers so he doesn’t look too desperate and makes Wooyoung think that he didn’t have any other options.

Which, he really didn’t, but Wooyoung didn’t need to know that.

“No.”

San swallows, and his breathing gets labored because he’s never been rejected so quickly before. He’s never been rejected at all, but that was because he’s never taken any risks like this, and now he was sporting two, big stoplight cheeks colored with embarrassment in front of Jung Wooyoung.

This is Yeosang’s fault. But he knew he couldn’t go back into his room without getting a yes from Wooyoung, so he tries something else.

“I’ll...I’ll pay you. I’ll pay.”

Wooyoung runs a hand through his light hair and over his eyes and he blows out a heavy sigh and shakes his head again.

“No.”

San lets out a breath that was full of disappointment through his nose and turns his attention to the blackout curtains, and runs a hand up and down the back of his neck, trying to think. He comes up short, turns around and walks out of there quickly, humiliation catching a ride on his shoulders as he shuts the door behind him and hears the click of a lamp switching off. The walk back to Yeosang’s room feels longer than his usual walk to school, doubled and multiplied by seven, to give him double times seven the chances to wallow in that horrible situation and embarrass himself even further.

When he opens the door to Yeosang’s room, the boy is there, playing Undertale on his beanbag chair, and he perks up when he sees San. The expression is quickly replaced with lips parted in sympathy and a head tilted in letdown when he sees San’s thoughts all reflected on the moonlit pond of unconscious tears at his eyes.

San shrugs.

“I’m fucked.” He closes the door behind him and lets himself fall back on Yeosang’s bed, his body hitting the mattress and a remote, hard plastics digging into his back, but he doesn’t move it because he deserves to be uncomfortable for once.

For thinking that maybe that idea could work and now all he’s got was shame and rejection circling around his head like bees in a hive, and he wants to get mad at Yeosang for pushing him to do this, but he doesn’t, because it was his fault, too. He was comfortable keeping up the charade of having someone so much so that he went through with a dumb plan like this, so maybe he deserved to be uncomfortable.

Hm.

He takes the remote out of the space between his back and the mattress.

“Sorry, bub. Maybe we could use someone else. I only suggested my brother because I thought it would be easier, but maybe you could get Joong or Hwa to help you. Gi’s a good option, too. If you really wanna go through.”

San shakes his head, feels wetness crawl down his temple, and quickly wipes it. “I’m giving up. There’s no use. I-”

There are then three more silver needles in his head, three knocks at Yeosang’s door that has him sitting up quickly because he didn’t want whoever was there to see him with his legs sprawled over the footboard of Yeosang’s bed.

“Come in!”

The door is pushed open on Yeosang’s command and there’s a very familiar hand clutching the doorknob, and very familiar starry eyes staring straight at San.

It’s Wooyoung.

The two are in silence, with Yeosang stuck in the middle of the jello cup awkward, and San can’t look Wooyoung in the eye. He does, once, and it lasts for two seconds before he’s feeling that shame again, and he’s mad that he didn’t get to admire how pretty they were but he doesn’t act on it. Wooyoung’s speaking through them, but his lips are sealed.

Until they’re not, and San’s heart is a moth fluttering against a heat lamp.

“Well, how much?”


	4. prune, you talk funny

Wooyoung.

San couldn’t stop thinking about the mystery that is Jung Wooyoung.

He couldn’t stop thinking about his mouth, his pretty lips stained coral and his porcelain smile of diamond. How any conversations or topics of thought can be superseded and discarded, just by the way he talks. How there was a tinge in his voice that said everything and nothing, melodies and tweaks that were dulcet in plastic wrapping.

And now, he’s here, sitting in his room, sitting in his orbit, and it feels like it’s just the two of them here, that Yeosang wasn’t just a few feet away down the hall. Like Moon Mimas and Ida, isolated, yet with the promise of other companies in mysterious spaces. And for San - Choi San - to be brave enough to plunge himself in the Sea of Fires and float with the waves of uncertainty for him to be here, in Wooyoung’s room in quiet loud noise with the afternoon sun casting white wine into the otherwise grey area of his room, lighting up their faces and shadowing Wooyoung’s hair against a honey amber window, was a milestone.

It still feels like a joke.

San kept to himself most of the time, was quiet, and dreamed a lot, and Wooyoung knew that, because he was always here. If he wasn’t at school with Yeosang, he was here, with Yeosang. And Wooyoung never really came out of his room to go talk to them, but he knew more about San than San thinks.

“So, when is this dinner you keep talking about?” Wooyoung’s voice is soft, like the tears in tissue paper when you shove it in a gift bag too hard, and he’s got his head tilted as if he really wanted to listen and San feels nervous again because he knows how Wooyoung can be.

“My, uh,” San swallows, his throat dry and nearly itchy but he doesn’t want to cough because he doesn’t want Wooyoung to think he was sick, and to not want to talk with him any less than he already did, “my mom wants it to be next weekend. Saturday.”

San doesn’t know what else to say. Wooyoung is looking at him like confidence and dignity were his clothing and his bedsheets and his mattress, and it’s like he knows San was barren of all of these necessities, and he feels small. Feels like he was made of wax and Wooyoung’s glare lit torches.

He looks at his lap.

“What do you want me to do?”

San shrugs, and Wooyoung quirks his lips in such a way that San definitely can’t keep steady eye contact with him now.

“I guess, just...act like a boyfriend. You’ve been a boyfriend before, h-haven’t you?”

Wooyoung quirks one, dark eyebrow, and San immediately regrets asking him that. He could have most definitely reworded it in a different way than that, something more _sensible_. But he asked as if being a boyfriend was an occupation that lots of teenage boys go into.

Jeez.

“I have. But never a fake boyfriend. You’ve never dated anyone either, I could tell.” Wooyoung’s voice now was different.

A little different.

San feels his cheeks rise up again, feels them painted with a heated rose, and he puts his attention on the analog clock, reads 4:08pm. What did he mean, he could tell? Could he also tell that he was nervous and iffy about everything? Could he also tell he’s never had his first kiss, yet, never held hands with anyone, never hugged anyone in that way? Could he tell all of those things?

And San wonders if Wooyoung was going to spend time picking him apart. He wonders if there would be a point where he was going to chip off the coating of the half-painted walls he has up, piece by piece, and be able to tell more than just those things. He wonders a lot about Wooyoung these days.

The clock changed to 4:09.

“Hello? Earth to San?”

San gives a small _hmm_ in acknowledgment, giving his attention back to Wooyoung and the way he’s sitting on his bed with a loose black t-shirt and black ripped jeans and black socks and a black belt on, and that his silvery hair was black shadows too as he sits against the sunshine.

“I asked you to tell me about yourself. If we’re going to be doing this, tell me about you. Sang was telling me about how good you are.”

San raises his eyebrows at the fact that Yeosang was probably talking him up to his brother while he was gone. He makes a mental note to whine about it to him later.

“Good? Did he...did he say at what?”

Wooyoung shakes his head and shrugs.

“You tell me.”

San thinks, because he doesn’t know either. He could say that he’s good at playing Undertale, but then he thinks of all the times that he’s gotten a GAME OVER title screen and he puts it away. He could say that he’s good at picking his own outfits, but he remembers that outfit from when he last came here, and despite getting more compliments from Yeosang than he knew what to do with, he puts that away, too.

“I like…” _No, what are we **good** at? _ “I’m good at collecting CDs. Vinyl records.” San shrugs, and he wants to jump out of the window right behind Wooyoung’s head and into the lemon light of the sun because that was so _fucking lame_ , but he doesn’t.

It’s more like he can’t.

He stays put in the chair but lets his mind jump out instead.

“Vinyl? You still listen to vinyl records?”

San nods.

“I don’t like using all that...fancy technology. I think...I think when you play music on vinyl, it sounds better. An accidental scratch in the u-usual flow, or skips in the track if your vinyl is a little dirty. Reminds me of...stuff.”

San likes music a lot, too. It reminded him of himself. Accidents and skips when he’s too nervous to hold it together, which is almost all the time when talking to people like _Wooyoung_. Resonant thoughts that play through the entire room and feel like the tuneful, catchy radio station he plays every morning on his way to school.

“Stuff, hm? That’s cute.”

Wooyoung makes his lips curl upwards into a position that San didn’t see much, but it never ceased to make his stomach do little flips and his heart butterfly into a mess of flutters and soars.

“What else? Like, your name. What’s with your name?”

San feels that sheet of defensive covering his back, and he remembers all the snide comments he would get when he was little, his elementary school classmates making fun of him for it. He really liked his name. Most other people’s names meant something stupid, like “one worthy of love” or “beautiful goddess”. San thinks it’s stupid because everyone was worthy of love or can be considered a goddess in some type of way, and his name didn’t bring attention to that. It just meant “mountain”.

It was different.

“What’s up with _your_ name?” His voice holds a mousetrap of the annoyance of protecting himself once again, turns the attention to Wooyoung instead.

Wooyoung’s name wasn’t weird at all to him, though. San liked how it was easy to say, easy to remember. It made his mouth feel weird whenever he said it.

Woo-young.

To be honest, he didn’t really care about Wooyoung’s name all that much, but it got Wooyoung’s eyes darting to the ceiling instead of peering into his, reading his head and watching the paper thin meaning of San’s nervous movements.

He finally shrugs.

“Dunno. My parents gave it to me. Sometimes I wish I had Yeosang’s name. It sounds cooler than Wooyoung, but whatever.” Wooyoung looks at his ripped jeans and then his bedsheets, trying to think. “Tell me more about you, San. Come on, I’m not a mindreader, dude.”

_Dude._

San could tell Wooyoung’s getting impatient, but he shrugs anyway, taking a liking to the shapes that the shadows made on the wood of Wooyoung’s floor. “I’m not really interesting. T-tell me something about...tell me about you.”

When Wooyoung talks, it’s as if all of the birds stopped chirping and the clouds had ceased their snail’s pace movements across the sky. San looks at the way his lips would quirk when he speaks, as if the sun had embedded itself into his skin and his bones and he needed to smile for it to shine every day. The way his lips would form the honeydew words he needed to get out, like a lovely, motion stop movie that San could watch all day and never get tired of. And when his eyes would glint again, globes of fireflies in the nighttime when he speaks about the things he’s ardent about, San knows that he would probably never stop thinking about it.

San found it easy to talk to Wooyoung, although he could never tell if the influx of his tone meant he was passionate about something or annoyed with San for even opening his mouth. But it was easy to talk to him.

Ever since Wooyoung began speaking, they held small, popcorn conversations about anything that came up. San was still nervous, but his hands weren’t as clammy and he stopped clutching the ends of his sleeves as much. Talking to Wooyoung was like reading Shakespearean literature, a world famous novel that you had yet to open because you didn't want to go through the complex read. And here he was, going through Wooyoung’s chapters and fine print, as he speaks of stories with his friends to his likes and dislikes. He told San how much he hated milk, but if he had to drink it, chocolate milk was the best, and San tells him about how much he likes strawberry milk because it tasted better to him and no one else really appreciated it, and _someone_ had to, and then Wooyoung called him weird. Wooyoung tells San about the way he hated rainbows because they were hard to see, and San tells him about how rainbows were the prettiest thing to him because they always happened after a storm.

Like a sliver of hope, the reds, oranges, yellows, blues, purples, and greens were the different shades that hope could come in. Pretty.

Wooyoung calls San weird again.

He finds him intriguing, nevertheless. He thinks his heart and his mind were like glass, made of a thick, transparent glass that holds love and deep thought in it. Pinks and indigos and crimsons and turquoises of love and thought, all see-through once he gets to talking. Like the split in the Red Sea of quietness and insecurity when it comes to talking about things he likes. He didn’t mind going through all that trouble to carefully spin San’s lock dial and find all the right combinations, because out of the zero people he talks to on a daily basis, San might just be his favorite one.

He was see-through.

Wooyoung wants to make San talk more. He was kind of strange, but it was something different to listen to. He thinks that maybe he would make an effort to try.

 _Maybe_.

Yeosang knocks on Wooyoung’s door, making the two quiet down their silence.

He opens the door, and San looks around the room again, realizes that the lemon light has turned into hues of honey, igniting the room in a flash of stop lights that tell you to slow down, engulfing the three of them like mosquitoes in resin.

“Is San still in here?” Yeosang looks to the desk chair that San had been loosely spinning back and forth in, and he perks. “San!”

“You just interrupted us. Kind of rude, if you ask me.” Wooyoung says, bringing a leg up to his chest and resting an arm on his knee, still sitting against the window.

“See, nobody asked. San, the rest are here to pick us up. Let’s go out.” Yeosang turns his attention to San, leaning a little bit of his weight in the door so that it creaks open further.

“Where are we going?” San asks, not getting up from the chair with the premise that maybe he wouldn’t want to go out with his trusted friends for the first time in his life and spend more time with the infamous Jung Wooyoung.

But for what? He had no more reason to keep talking to him. Maybe it would help the plan that the two were messily trying to pull off, but other than that, there was no reason.

There was no reason to stay here.

Yeosang shrugs, pouting his bottom lip out and shaking his head. “Party.”

“Yeo, I hate parties. Too many people, too much weed.”

“This is a kid named Jongho’s party, the guy from our macro class. It’s just a small thing with friends from Huiding. Plus, we’re going for Mingi. Yunho’s his brother, so he’s going to be there,” Yeosang says, and he glances at his brother sitting on the bed and listening to their conversation.

“Huiding? Our rival school? Why are we going to a Huiding party?”

“Well, would you rather stay here and talk to Wooyoung?”

What type of demonic question was that? It puts San in a dilemma. If he gets up, he’s going to seem rude. If he stays, he’s going to seem rude. But this was uncharted territory he was in, and he didn’t know Wooyoung that well, despite learning that he liked chocolate milk if he had to drink it and hated rainbows.

San gets up anyway, shuffling awkwardly over to Yeosang and feeling like Wooyoung’s firefly orbs were blinding spotlights, on him and following his trail and shadowing his thoughts and feelings down to the way he moved his toes in his socks.

He doesn’t look back to say goodbye to Wooyoung, because there never was a goodbye when it came to San and anyone in this house. Not their mother, not Yeosang, not Wooyoung, because he knew he would be right back here by tomorrow, if not, the day after that. So he goes through the open door, feels like he’s going through a little bubble of Wooyoung, and breaks his orbit again, feels the magnet pull at him, but he leaves.

“Same time tomorrow?” Wooyoung calls after, and San can’t tell what’s in his voice this time, if it’s warm syrup on pancakes or tissue paper again, but he nods.

Same time tomorrow.


	5. without sparking some

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello there's a heavy storm here and i'm very sorry that the updates are slow! here are a couple of chapters to make up the big gap before my power goes out for the fifth time
> 
> there is a bit of alcohol use and drug mention in here stay safe please 
> 
> enjoy!

He’s fucking drunk.

He never liked parties, but this one proved to be okay when it was just a bunch of different friend groups keeping to themselves. There was THC in about four different forms, but San stayed away from that because the high lasted too long and he could barely speak correct sentences when it was the right stuff. The alcohol provided were in pretty blue and purple and white bottles with strange gold cursive fonts and San had poured some into his little red Solo cup, creating a potion of incoherence and slurred speech and regrettable decisions and a _really_ bad hangover in the morning, but that wasn’t a problem for him at this time.

That was a problem for 10-hours-from-now San.

He was sprawled out on that boy’s couch - Jonothan? Joshua? - and he’s on Cloud 9 with the way that stuff in his cup was mixed, like a swirled soliloquy of a muddled mind and cheeks stained rose petal. His feet are off the ground and he’s swimming with the stars, touching the auroras while speaking to the moon. Yeosang is sitting on the couch next to San, a little too close for usual, but neither of them seemed to care because the alcohol was making San feel like leather by himself and being this close to someone else was an emollient.

“San, San, _Sannie_. I’m crossed. Someone was passing joints outside and...I got the r-rest. I got the rest of it. I’m crossed, Sannie~.” Yeosang’s voice is gurgled, like a bog in the middle of a misty forest, and San smiles, eyes taking on the glaze of a ceramic table piece as he looks at the sky.

“I can’t go back. To my mom’s like this. She’ll...kill me.” San says and lolls his heavy head onto Yeosang’s shoulder, but he missed and soon he’s bent in half at the waist and resting on his lap instead.

He’ll take it.

“How’s Wooyoung? How’s my brother? Is he mean? He’s an asshole, right?” Yeosang asks, and he’s playing with San’s cheeks again but this time his delicate fingers weren’t taking heed to the nerves under his skin and he was pinching like crab claws, morphing his mouth with the pulls of his fingers.

He shoos his hand away.

“Hey!” San gets up from Yeosang’s lap, tries to sit up straight but his back is like the vibrations of a B string acoustic, and he’s leaning over a bit, “He’s not...He’s not an asshole. He’s not,” San lets his big head fall back on the couch, and the dim ceiling lamp was a big supernova above him, pulling its fingers into his cotton ball eyes and misty swamp head.

He barely feels Yeosang lay down on his lap this time, shutting his eyes to try and sleep. Time was always slower at parties, for some strange, _strange_ reason.

San shuts his eyes. He thinks about all the topics they talked about earlier and sees the sun rays on Wooyoung’s tongue and the horizons in his throat, remembers how the time stopped, and maybe San thinks the world _does_ stop for people.

Maybe.

“Yes, he is. Today, you just...you just got l-lucky. He’s gonna break your heart and be an asshole again tomorrow. If not...a few...a few days” Yeosang says, and he stretches his hands above his head and knocks the armrest of the couch, letting out a sound of pain but his knuckles barely grazed the fabric.

“Don’t s-say that about your brother. He’s very...nice.” San opens his eyes again and goes to look at Yeosang and tell him that his head was too high up and pressing right on his full bladder, but he sees Mingi stumbling towards them with a boy holding his shoulders.

They’re like a weird waltz, as they try not to bump into people, but they do anyway and they go back, step forward, two steps back, turn, step forward.

He’s on the couch now. His laugh is loud, like the dandelion petals that sweep with the gusts of summer winds, and San smiles.

Mingi.

Mingi always has an effect. If he’s laughing, San’s laughing, just as loud and just as hard, even if he never heard the joke. If Mingi’s crying, which San really hoped never happened again, he feels the tears at his eyes and he’s asking him what’s wrong and crying with him, just as loud and just as hard. Mingi was magnetic. He drew everyone in and you stuck to him, even if you didn’t want to. And when San is looking at Mingi and this boy, talking and laughing on the couch before him, sees the way he stares at his mouth with dreamed eyes when Mingi’s head is thrown back in a boisterous laugh, San hopes he was the alloy in his magnetic field, the elliptical gravitational pull of Venus that might follow a different path than the rest, but he hoped he was in his orbit.

“San! Yeosang! Hello!” Mingi notices the two on the couch opposite of them, but the music is playing outside and there’s barely anyone in here, and there was no need to shout or wave as if he had lost the two in a crowd, but San waves back anyway, and Yeosang shouts hello, too.

“Where is Hongjoong? And where is...Seonghwa? Where’s Hwa?” Mingi’s voice had the conversations of alcohol and marijuana on it, like jelly on bread.

He was crossed, too.

“Hwa is missing? There goes my nap.” Yeosang leans up from off of San’s lap to look around the room for him, and as if Yeosang was trying to summon spirits from incantations and rabbit’s feet, the boy comes gliding in through the door, silent, yet louder than the music blaring outside.

Seonghwa to San was a sunrise on a midnight morning. It was a pastiche, a magnificent sight to see, and you couldn’t help but stay silent when it comes, so you don’t miss it. You might miss the twitch of eyebrows when he’s intently listening to you talk about your day, the curl of fingers around yours when you were crying. San couldn’t help but stay quiet when Seonghwa sits down on the couch he was on because he didn’t want to miss anything he said, and Yeosang immediately leaves his lap to perch himself on Seonghwa’s.

San is leather again.

“Hwa, I missed you!” Yeosang’s voice is out, and it’s deep like the woods but holds more than that in it when he’s talking to Seonghwa, and San looks at them and sees the way Yeosang’s teeth are showing in his grin and how Seonghwa’s got his waist in his hands and he listens to the fructose drip of his voice.

“I missed you, too, Petal.”

He’s seen Yeosang smile lots of times, at least five times a day, but something about this one was different. He could tell that he thought of Hwa as his lagniappe, like someone kept coming back to his doorstep and surprised him with a little gift every day, and when he smiles it’s like a garden of pretty roses and petunias and soft lily pads on tranquil corona ponds, and he gets why he’s got that name for him. San likes to think of the two of them sometimes, whenever he’s feeling sad, thinks about the glow that comes in between them and the love that takes the form of gentle cinders and precious bauble, and he smiles.

He feels a little happier for the day.

San looks at Mingi and Yunho, sees the two of them still talking. Yeosang and Seonghwa were too busy tasting the alcohol each other’s lips and the leftover music on skin. He feels the alcohol beginning to wear off, wondering whether he’s instantly built up a tolerance or the liquor wasn’t as good as he thought, and stands up, leather legs and leather arms, and follows the trail of drunk bodies, feels warmed chests against his arms and the sour sweet smell of sweat as he passes a crowd of people who had just come in from dancing outside. He forgets to bring his Solo cup to refill, but he hopes there are more or a mostly empty bottle that he could down and keep up with the drag race of booze in his stomach.

He sees a rimmed, black hat across the backyard, by the white tables with the bottles of liquor, nodding at something and talking to a boy. It’s Hongjoong, he could tell because he showed up in San’s favorite black and white sweater, and he’s holding a cup, but San knows that it’s either empty from never being filled, or has a little bit of water in it disguised as vodka. Hongjoong never drinks. He keeps up his clean streak of never drinking, never smoking, because he knew he would always be the one taking care of his friends who could barely stand or speak correctly.

Hongjoong never drinks.

San goes to walk over, makes sure to radiate with the stars and the nighttime quietness against the blaring, generic EDM music that played on the specific radio station on 206.5 FM. San always remembered because his favorite radio station was one dial turn after that.

Hongjoong hears his footsteps crushing the grass beneath him, and he turns over his shoulder. There’s no glaze in his eyes, no red-tipped nose, no alcohol waves on the surf of his breath.

“San, hey! Did you meet Jongho? From macro?”

Hongjoong steps back, removes the barrier from between shy, dreamy San and new-person-Jongho.

Ah, Jongho. That was his name.

San thinks for a millisecond, looks at Jongho’s auburn hair and the way it reflects the milky white of the moon. He puts his hands in the pockets of his track pants, takes what he can from all those stupid high school comedy flicks that Yeosang dragged him to every so often.

“H-hi. This is an awesome party.”

Jongho smiles, and it’s one of genuine appreciation that had the corners of incarnadine lips indenting his cheeks, and San can’t help but smile, too.

“Thank you! I’m glad you guys came. You’re friends with Seonghwa and Yeosang, right? The only people that aren’t literal crackheads at school.”

San finds that funny. There are drugs and alcohol and probably illegal substances that someone might have brought with them, doing lines in the corner of the living room table, but he puts that away.

Still, it’s kind of funny.

“I’ve...seen you around before. Maybe we could all hang out after class.” San says, knowing damn well that he hated hanging out with new people, but Joong seems to like him and Mingi’s in love with his brother, so maybe.

“San, have you seen the others?” Hongjoong asks, and San nods, gestures back to the living room area.

“They’re on the couch. You...are you planning on leaving, soon?” It’s then when he notices how chilly it was out here, how the nippy winds of starting Novemeber sent goosebumps to litter his exposed skin.

Hongjoong shrugs, drinks his water.

“It’s nearly one in the morning, but it depends on you. Most people start to leave by now.” Jongho’s phone is bright, mixed with the dark nighttime and the booze in his head.

He has to look away.

“Okay, ‘m gonna go...tell them.” San takes this as the perfect opportunity to sly out of Jongho’s line of vision, hoping he made a good enough impression for him, but at the same time, not really caring.

“Ah, okay. I’ll meet you, soon, then.” Hongjoong looks at him with a small smile, to where his top lip would flutter up like a sheet in the breeze, and his bottom would curl up in reassurance and support.

San doesn’t know what he’s being reassured of, but it works.

He leaves, listens to the blaring EDM as he walks by the speaker and the crunch of grass under his feet, sees his friends still on the couches and the spot where he left empty was still empty. Like it was their territory and they were waiting for him to come back.

“San, hi. Where’d you go?” Seonghwa asks, his voice curious, and San looks at a sleeping Yeosang hiding his face in the crook of his neck down to the clasp of Seonghwa’s hands around his waist, keeping Yeo from falling off, and he gestures back outside.

“He’s coming soon. Talking...talking about leaving soon. It’s one AM.”

“One? Holy shit, dude. We need to go.” Seonghwa adjusts himself on the couch, but has to get through the task of waking up Yeosang first, and he does so by lightly tugging at the hair flopped in his forehead. It takes him a little while, but soon Yeosang is stirred and his nose is pink and he’s got a pout on his lips.

San smiles at his friend, lightly pinches his cheek between his fingers when he stands up, and he chuckles when Yeosang looks at him like one of them want to die.

One of them, he can’t tell.

Hongjoong walks in soon after, just when San was thinking about him and his big red van and how he’s supposed to sleep this off without getting a hangover later.

He hated parties.

But they all pile in anyway, Mingi in the front since _tall people have bad knees and need to sit in the front,_ and he was next to Seonghwa while Yeosang took up the entire third row, sleeping against the left cup holder. The party had been a few miles from their neighborhood, but Yeosang and San lived the closest, so they were out first.

“Bye, friends. Thank you, Joong,” San had begun to sober up again as soon as he got into the car, but the beginnings of a headache were tapping at his temples and pushing at the back of his brain. He still helps a drowsy Yeosang out of the car and onto his back and into his house, making sure to wave at Hongjoong and tell him that he could leave. San fishes the key out of the pocket of Yeosang’s bright red letterman, using his left hand to unlock the door, feeling the sharp ache of twisting his wrist in a weird way beneath his bones.

He should have been holding onto Yeosang’s other leg instead.

It’s a process, but he shuts the door behind him and the normally warm, outside air was replaced with clearing breeze from the air conditioner hidden somewhere in the house.

“Yeosang?”

San’s heart nearly drops to his ass when he hears him, hears the carry of dewdrops on morning leaves down the hall as he calls for him. Yeosang is nearly passed out, sleeping on San with his arms loosely around his neck and his face hidden in his shoulder, and he could barely stand up once his bones were replaced with the remnants of booze underneath his weight, but he didn’t mind when it comes to him. He needed to get him to his room.

He stumbles a bit, and the light from the upstairs is obscured a little by a shadow as soon as he gets to the bottom stair. San swallows, tastes the alcohol still on his tongue, and he stares at him for a moment, blocking the stairway.

“Is he okay?” Wooyoung asks, and he moves a bit to go help the two of them, but San is already climbing up the stairs with Yeosang, dragging his feet.

“Yeah, he’s fine. Alcohol was...too strong, I guess.”

Wooyoung steps back to give San space, and he was halfway up, limbs tired and body like driftwood, but he keeps going.

“Are you going home like that? Your mom's gonna kill you.”

“I know. I’ll sleep with Yeosang.” San’s voice is croaked, and he truly did sound like one of those animated frogs in the movies, and he blames it on the spice of the liquor still in his system.

 _Okay_ was all he said, and then he’s walking back into his black room with his black socks on his feet, shutting the door behind him and leaving San to himself.

Okay, okay.

He goes with Yeosang into his room, now hues of blueberries and the ivory shine of the moon, and when he walks past his window with the curtains over it, it lights the two of them up like phantoms at the midnight hour. He lets Yeosang melt onto his bed, and he looks at his jeans because he knows you’re supposed to do that for your friend when they’re too drunk to do anything. So he loops his jeans button back out of the hole and unzips the fastener, shimmys them down a giggling Yeosang’s legs, tells him to stop laughing and go back to sleep, before throwing them in the corner of the room next to the television. It was close enough to where his hamper was anyway, so he didn’t care.

Yeosang definitely doesn’t.

“Sannie! It’s cold!” Yeosang speaks like a soft bog, and he makes grabby hands at San and he finds it cute and laughs because his red letterman was a little too big for him, and San goes back to kicking off his shoes.

“Then go under the blanket, Sang. It’s right under you.” San could barely hear himself speak, but he’s not as drunk as he was anymore and the moonlight is pleasant as it crosses his feet.

Yeosang’s eyes are closed now, and he’s still as if he suddenly died.

San sighs.

He looks at Yeosang, and he was in the middle of the mattress and already asleep, so it would be hard to get him to the other side, and San worries that he’s going to have to sleep on the bean bag chair with all the uncomfortable styrofoam balls and the dust bunnies in the corner.

There are noises at the door, but they’re too soft for San to really register and he doesn’t notice that they were knocks of a light knuckle against the wood. He looks up, has a vague idea of it being Wooyoung, and-

Think of the devil, and he shall appear.

He’s holding a glass, decorative and probably only used for special occasions but he has it out anyway, with chunks of ice like the crystals in chandeliers and frost on it like it really was a winter’s day in there. San’s mouth watered looking at it.

He probably should drink more water.

“Hi. I brought this for you.” Wooyoung gently shakes the bottle of pills in his other hand, sharply hearing them move about like the cheap maracas he used to play with in his elementary music class, “Yeosang looks dead, so he’ll have to deal with it in the morning himself.”

San glances at his friend, sees him still in the same position as before, and then he remembers Wooyoung is holding a glass out to him and he takes it, holds the bottle of pills in his other hand.

“Thank you.” San can’t look him in the face, but he knows he smiled softly in response, where, if he really did look, the winds of October would seep into his skin, would make his chest twirl like the autumn leaves and cheeks heat under the cloudy sun.

He never sees it.

“Did Sang take something?” Wooyoung asks, and he walks over, has his hand in his black joggers, has the other one on Yeosang’s cheeks, squishing his face slightly as he looks him over.

This is probably the first time Wooyoung’s ever shown concern for anyone. San practically lived here, under the same roof as Wooyoung and Yeosang, and in the every-other-day he’s been here, Wooyoung never cared about anything.

Never gave two hot shits.

He realizes he’s peering into Wooyoung, before he pulls himself back and snaps his eyes up to his with a blink before answering him.

“N-no. Just too much to drink.”

And he pops two pills into his mouth, setting the cheap maraca pill bottle on the nightstand and downing about half the water, his mouth of sponge cotton and sour sugar.

“Are you going to be okay?”

San nods, and Wooyoung looks at him for some more time, and he’s in his submarine about to sink. San keeps his focus trained on the way his ice cubes floated in the water like December diamonds, how the chill seeped into his skin from the cold.

They’re in silence again, and San _feels_ Wooyoung staring at him but he doesn’t know for _what._ He looks at the grit in between Yeosang’s tiles for help on what to say, what to do. He feels trapped in rosin, strayed too close to the sticky fly tape and got himself stuck.

“Stop staring at me,” San says, voice cutting through the thick reticence that the early morning offered, but it comes out in a skittish whisper instead and he’s even more embarrassed.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re thinking.” Wooyoung shoves his hands into the pockets of his night black joggers with drawstrings at the waist. “You’re interesting to me.”

“D-don’t. Don’t say that.” San clutching the slippery glass too hard, so he loosens up a bit, feels the glass skate against his palm.

“You should open up more.” Wooyoung pays San no mind as he turns back to Yeosang’s door to leave, doesn’t hear the rattlesnake quiver of his voice or the uncertainty in what he even says, as if he just learned to talk yesterday, “If you want this to work.”

San finds that laughable; _open up more_. He could barely order a pizza on the phone and avoids aisles with workers in them when he goes to department stores so they don’t ask him if he needs help and he makes a fool of himself.

“What to work?”

“Us. Don’t tell me you forgot our deal?”

San deflates.

He forgot that the two of them had a task and that they were building up...whatever the hell it was, on planks of sogged, termite wood and thin glass bottles and tying it together with cheap yarn that you’d get from the craft store. San feels that impending cataclysm that one of them is going to fall off of it soon, headfirst to the all too hard ground, but…

He puts it away.

“O’course not.”

San finally puts the glass down on Yeo’s nightstand, loosens a bit more, and Wooyoung’s hand is on the doorknob as he glances at San one more time.

“Pretend date tomorrow.”

San chokes on his words, blinks twice and his heart beating machine gun bullets into his ears.

“Wh-what?”

His expression was unchanging in the milky light from the moon today.

“Let’s go on a fake date tomorrow. See, that way, if your mom asks, we could tell her about it. Think.”

San swallows again, his head like the Orfield Laboratories and Wooyoung’s voice was the pin drop in the corner of the room.

_A fake date tomorrow. With Wooyoung._

Wooyoung has a smirk on his face, San remembers it as the position that makes his heart feather, as he looks at the state that San put him in, and he thinks of him as a flame in this dark room. He stood out.

“I’ll let you think about it. Goodnight, San.”

Before San could think of anything to say, the wooden door is closed, and the sound of ruffling sheets peels his attention away from it to Yeosang.

His eyes are open slightly and he’s looking at San with that same smile.

“Look at… _that!_ I just got you a date with m-my brother. Everyone say ‘thank you, Yeosang, best-est best friend!’.” Yeosang’s small voice is like a taboo in the quiet air and nearly gives San a heart attack.

“What the fuck! I thought you died. Scoot over.” San tells him, voice hushed, too, as if Wooyoung was still in his bedroom.

“Nope. It...it was part of my plan!” Yeosang giggles, where his shoulders would move off of the bed and his eyes would close and San feels himself smiling, threatening to break.

“Are you still drunk? Did you take something? An edible? Are you tripping on acid?” San lays down on his back and stares at the ceiling, at the little glow-in-the-dark stars and meteors and rocket ships that littered the otherwise white paint.

“No!” Yeosang turns and San flinches, his loud voice stinging right into his ear.

“How come you kept your room green but put glow stars on the ceiling? Stars aren’t green,” San says, resting his hands on his stomach while Yeosang throws a leg over him and hides his face in San’s arm, smelling of booze and fresh cut grass.

“Because.”

“Oh.”

And while Yeosang sleeps peacefully next to San, he can’t help but still feel of leather. He has his foot constantly shaking, as a way to help his sleep, but instead of a silent lullaby it’s as if all of the jitters he has for tomorrow in his head and his chest had pulled themselves out of his veins and vessels and planted into it. He would shake himself to nothingness, float off into the clouds had Yeosang not been there to keep him to the ground.

He’s got a date tomorrow with Wooyoung.

Holy shit.

And he gasps slightly once he remembers the party and Yeosang as he hears a tiny snore escape his friend’s lips. He never went to the restroom.


	6. yeosang!

**yeo:** _BITCHES_

 **yeo:** _GUESS WHO HELPED SAN SCORE A DATE WITH WOOYOUNG_

 **yeo:** _EVERYONE SAY THANK YOU KANG YEOSANG_

 **gigi:** _oh worm??_

 **hwa:** _They grow up so fast eye-_

**_YEOSANG_ **

**_SHUT UP_ **

**_i still didn’t say yes_ **

**_plus it’s for our fake date_ **

**_he said it would help_ **

**yeo:** _sir he lied to you_

 **gigi:** _horton hears a bitch ass liar!_

 **gigi:** _this was really something he didn’t care ab you think he would go out of his way to ask u on a fake date?? chuh_

 **joong:** _has he ever had a boyfriend before_

 **yeo:** _no san is his first_

 **yeo:** _\+ who the hell asks someone on a fake date for a fake relationship_

 **gigi:** _who has fake relationships what u think this is_

 **gigi:** _fanfiction???? lmao_

**_GI SHUT UP_ **

**_IM NOT HIS BOYFRIEND_ **

**_HES NOT MY BOYFRIEND_ **

**_he’s been a boyfriend before_ **

**yeo:** _san we get it you wanna keep your relationships from us but here’s a secret,,,, you can’t_

 **yeo:**   _also have you gotten any texts yet from a 966 number_

 **yeo:**   _no reason in particular its not wooyoung i didn't give him ur number im just asking_

 **hwa:** _JSNDISNDJDND_

 **hwa:** _Yeosang you’re gonna give him a hEART ATTACK_

**_SIR YOU WHAT_ **

**_YEOSANG YOU DID WHAT_ **

**_WHAT_ **

**_KFSDJFSDFJS_ **

**_SDFJBSDJFHBSDFJHDS_ **

**_SDKFJBSFJHBFJS_ **

**hwa:** _See_

 **gigi:** _omg san let’s go on a double date_

 **joong:** _omg u got a date w yunho???_

 **hwa:** _OMG_

 **hwa:** Sang let's go on a triple date!

 **joong:** _FUCK YALL_

 **joong:** _IM THE ONLY SINGLE ONE IN HERE_

 **joong:** _this is hererophobia :/_

 **hwa:** “ _Hererophobia”_

 **joong:** _HETEROPHOBIA_

 **gigi:** _um thats a lie bc u type in lowercase therefore u are a homosexual_

 **gigi:** _hongjoong gay_

**_omg expose thread_ **

**yeo:** _hwa types with caps sometimes_

 **gigi:** _yeah but he says KSNDISNDJD a lot so it doesn’t count_

 **yeo:** _oh ok_

 **yeo:** _fuck joong lives!!! we are SKINNY_

 **hwa:** _Gay rights!!!_

 **gigi:** _we’re gonna make joong leave sksjsjsjsj_

 **yeo:** _if u leave ur gay_

 **joong** left the conversation.

 **You** added **joong** to the conversation.

 **gigi:** _and i- oop_

 **yeo:** _as i said_

**_joong i lov u don’t leave :(_ **

**_yes pls i don’t wanna go tomorrow by myself lets go on a group date_ **

**_what if he thinks i’m an idiot_ **

**_he called me weird twice yesterday_ **

**_my self esteem cannot handle this_ **

**yeo:** _omg we love pet names <333 _

**joong:** _yes!! like weirdo and dumb ass bitch <3333 _

**gigi:** _don’t forget stinky slut and stupid whore <333 _

**_omg_ **

**_CAN YOU THREE STOP_ **

**_let’s talk about yunho_ **

**_i wanna talk about yunho_ **

**gigi:** _YUNHOOOO <33333_

 **gigi:** _he works at a little restaurant near polaris street_

 **hwa:** _We love a working man!_

 **yeo:** _oh he RICH rich_

 **gigi:** _did you guys know that i am in hearts with him_

 **hwa:** _No I didn’t could you remind us again_

 **joong:** _who’s yunho_

 **yeo:** _the boy that we hung out with at the party_

 **gigi:**   _jongho's brother_

 **yeo:** _you weren’t there bc u were too busy being lAME and drinking WATER_

 **joong:** _bitch clear skin don’t come easy!_

 **hwa:** _Grind don’t stop I guess_

**_WHAT TIME WOULD IT EVEN BE_ **

**_should i say 5:15pm???_ **

**_is that too early????_ **

**yeo:** _do you want me to tell him that_

 **yeo:** _he’s literally in my room bitching about birds_

**_omg i’m gonna throw up_ **

**yeo:** _do you want me to tell him that too_

 **hwa:** _What’s wrong with the birds???_

 **yeo:** _literally nothing,, they were just chirping too loud_

 **yeo:** _u know the huge oak between me and san’s?? Well those are where the birds are and he comes in like_

 **yeo:** _“these fUCKIN birds”_

 **yeo:** _and i’m like ?????? dawg get out of my room_

 **yeo:** _and now he’s in here talking about them_

 **gigi:** _yeosang sweetie i think ur brother might be on crack_

 **yeo:** _oh yeah no question_

 **joong:** _wait san what are you gonna wear today_

 **joong:** _you gotta look cute_

 **hwa:** _^^^^_

 **yeo:** _i think we should call an emergency yogurt smoothie party_

 **hwa:** _“Yogurt smoothie party” I’m sICK_

**_pls someone come over_ **

**_and bring yogurt smoothies_ **

**hwa:** _Okay I’ll bring the smoothies and the cream bread from your favorite store_

 **joong:** _i’ll bring clothes for u to try c:_

 **gigi:** _i’ll bring my mouth and empty stomach_

 **gigi:** _AND my unconditional support bc i <3 u _

**yeo:** _if i MUST i’ll bring my love and support too but u gotta beg_

 **joong:** _beg??? that’s hwa’s job_

 **gigi:** _I CHOKED_

 **hwa:** _T_ _he way I'm gonna smack you when I see you_

**_thank u hwa :(_ **

**_thank u hongjoong :(((_ **

**_thank u mingi :((((_ **

**_i guess thank u too yeo but u suck_ **

**hwa:** _Anything for you baby <333 _

**gigi:** _what hwa said_

 **joong:** _of course !_

 **yeo:** _muah <3 _

**joong:** _WAIT SAN IS MS CHOI HOME_

 **yeo:** _.........._ _WHO_

 **hwa:** _He typed “Ms. Choi”,,, had time to reread it,,,, and pressed send with his whole chest_

 **gigi:** _don’t clown joong he don’t deserve that_

**_JSBDJDNDJ_ **

**_SHES NOT_ **

**_ITS JUST ME_ **

**_IM HANGING OUT ON THE TREE_ **

**yeo:** _SAY LESS IM COMING TO SIT WITH U AND KEEP U COMPANY_

**_wAIT_ **

**_isnt wooyoung in ur room_ **

**_i cant see the blinds are shut :/_ **

**yeo:** _no he left_

 **yeo:** _are u implying that u look through my blinds when theyre open_

 **gigi:** _san ur into that type shit_

**_im going to have a stroke_ **

**_i hate u guys_ **

**_a lot_ **

…

 **9669686443:** _san_

 **9669686443:** _what time and where you want to meet tomorrow_

 **wooyoung (brother):** _for the date_

**_don’t call it that_ **

**_not a date_ **

**wooyoung (brother):** _:(_

 **wooyoung (yeosang’s brother):** _do you want to go out? or stay home??_

**_uh_ **

**_whatever you want_ **

**wooyoung (yeosang’s brother):** _okay, let’s go to my friends’ restaurant_

 **wooyoung (yeo’s brother):** _he’s nice!_

**_okay_ **

**_what time_ **

**_would you wanna go_ **

**_on it_ **

**wooyoung (yeosang):** _any time you want_

 **wooyoung (yeosang):** _you tell me san_

**_5:15_ **

**_?_ **

**_if its not okay pls tell me_ **

**wooyoung:** _thats fine :)_

 **wooyoung (yeosang):** _i’ll meet you then_

 **wooyoung:** _wear sumn pretty ;)_

**_shut up_ **

**wooyoung:** _:(_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the wayyy that these are literally inspired by the convos i have w my gc sjsjsjsj


	7. where's your rosy rush?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i’m sorry for the delay!
> 
> ap season is over for me so you know what that means!! i'm still writing and filling in even if i don't post, please don't give up on me! this fic is gonna be way longer than i intended, however! we'll get through it together c:
> 
> thank you for everything! literally all of you guys are so SWEET like my moots and cc's motivate me a ton to continue this, so thank you! hopefully i don't disappoint u i'll cry
> 
> n e ways! here is another chapter, please enjoy!
> 
> p.s. for those still taking finals- good luck! pls eat breakfast and go to sleep before 11 and study your butt off! i'm rooting for you! c:

Gravity.

That’s such a weird concept. Imagine an invisible force that kept you the ground. And if the ground wasn’t there, you’d be floating, not keeping center around the middle of the Earth. Imagine feeling that pull, that unwanted desire to go _do_ something. San really wants to go against it, like holding on to a branch of the tree right in the middle of his and Yeosang’s house, and seeing how long it would take Gravity to reach out to him and cover him in hands of phenomena and pull him to the ground.

Gravity gets lonely too, sometimes. San thinks of all the falls he’s made, all the grass he’s laid in and the sidewalks he’s stepped on. All because Gravity wanted some company, he supposed.

Hm.

And San knows that his Gravity is here, a few tables away, probably not really _wanting_ the company, but more like needing the company instead, in order for things to work.

“Are you nervous?”

Yeosang’s voice is like a balloon popping in his right ear as he has an arm thrown loosely around his shoulders, knowing his friend was not the best at walking, much less talking, like a normal human when he was anxious like this.

San could barely speak.

He nods and holds on to the ends of his shirt as if it would help calm him down and he would have _some_ type of leverage when he’s pulled. Yeosang came in with him instead of the others because he threatened to throw up and he would at any moment - that part was true - but it was enough to get them to stay in the car.

He sees his cynosure, his hair the same and his eyes the same and the way he sits all the same, but there’s a strange aura around him as he stays underneath the dim lights of the restaurant, like a beautiful halo of ambers pressing against his skin and shadowing his features in a way that has San’s chest caving and he’s back in his Gravity.

“Okay, bub. Go!” Yeosang kisses the top of San’s head, quickly fixing it back into its original position as if it was a smudge mark in his freshly drawn sketch and if anything was slightly off, it’d be ruined.

He shoos him away, embarrassed, though it was way too crowded in here for someone to see them.

San blows out a breath, and then he turns to Yeosang to ask him a good conversation topic, but sees him already running out of the door of the restaurant. He swallows down his nerves and immediately regrets it, feeling his stomach boil like a bottle of shaken cider.

There’s no way he could eat, now.

He gets closer, focuses on the array of expensive liquors they had lining the shelves on the back wall, some of them at Jongho’s party, and the lights are especially bright near the bar and the black gloss tiles and there are too many people here to him to really be okay with, and his thoughts feel like steam from a pot of hot water as he walks through his invisible safety net to get to-

“Hi.”

San can’t meet his eyes, just stares at his plain, silky mustard button up (that had the top four buttons undone, but San ignored that) and plain black jeans and beat up vans, and San nearly thinks that Wooyoung only tried a little bit, but it works. He could never pull off an outfit like that, but it seems like Wooyoung could do anything these days.

“Hello. Sorry to...to keep you waiting.” San makes conversation with the pretty black chair provided for him to sit in across from Wooyoung instead.

“It’s okay. I know Yeosang was home with you, probably kept you.”

San hopes that Wooyoung doesn’t realize that the actual reason he was late was that he spent a good twenty minutes in the mirror talking to himself and trying to calm himself down, because _it’s only Wooyoung, who cares? He drinks water and eats pizza just like you. Just like Yeosang._

And then he pictures himself going on a date with Yeosang and feels even sicker.

He scoots his butt back on the plush black chair underneath the small table with white table cloth, appreciating the pretty typewritten menu and the dim lights and the airy atmosphere and the light murmurs of everyone around them to drown out his nerves.

He’s okay for now.

“So, let’s talk about Saturday. It’s a week away.” Wooyoung leans back on his chair, and San feels the soles of his sneakers touching his feet as he completely fucks off the proper make-a-good-impression-on-the-first-date attitude.

San avoids his eye contact and instead looks at the back of a balding old man’s head behind his shoulder. He goes back to the menu.

“Th-that means we have a week to...to practice.” San melts pink onto his cheeks when he thinks about it.

“What about the money?”

Oh, yeah.

San completely forgot, was able to let it slip out of his head that he was on a mission, just until next Saturday, and he had to give Wooyoung money in order for him to pretend to date him so his mom would believe him about being gay.

San listens out for the steady BLEEP when he thinks of it, hears it in the back of his head in the form of his mom's dismissal.

He feels stupid, the laceleaf wash of naivety on his cheeks and he looks down at his lap.

“How much...how much do you want?” San asks, and the words feel strange on his tongue, almost like when he says “Woo-young” but different similar.

Wooyoung shrugs, and he purses his lips again like he does when he’s thinking hard, and San looks away, the laceleaf bleeding into his neck now.

“I don’t know. Holding hands would be the equivalent of like…” Wooyoung shrugs again, looking up at the glossy ceiling, “two dollars.”

San makes a face, his eyebrows knitted together and nearly touching.

“I’ve never held hands before. I don’t think I’d like it. What, you’ve got a menu?” San asks, his voice soft as he focuses on the many options of drinks as if he was going to get anything different from water.

Wooyoung chuckles, smiles and shows his teeth that knocks the breath out of San, reminds him of sitting near the lake behind the abandoned house down the street and watching the ducks and turtles swim underneath the bath of the sunset, and he’s glad the lights in here are dark enough to hide his flush.

“I do. I thought of it, so we both get something out of it. You get experience, I get money.”

Wooyoung runs a hand through his pretty silver hair, and it shines like it’s made of the most expensive gossamer threading underneath the gold lights.

San shrugs one shoulder, thinking.

“I guess...that’s maybe fair.”

San hadn’t even looked past the second option in the impressive selection of drinks when the waiter comes over, and San immediately recognizes him, but can’t put a finger on it. It’s at the tip of his tongue, like he ate sour candy and the taste is ringing his mouth.

“Wooyoung? Didn’t think I’d see you here. And I missed you at Jongho’s party! What, you just didn’t wanna see me?” He glances up at Wooyoung while flipping through his notepad for the next blank page.

San looks him in his eyes for a few seconds before his heart starts beating in confrontation, because _who the fuck was he?_ He remembers his candy voice so vaguely, cassonade gloss over the curls of his words that came so easily, there were about two people who sounded like that.

The pretty cheerleader who sits in front of him and had been trying to get his number for some time now, and that boy he met at a party once.

One of the parties.

“This place is too good for me? I always wanna see your pretty face, Yunho. I was just busy the day of the party.” Wooyoung smiles and looks up at him, and he smiles something of crepuscular rays, and San gasps.

“Yunho?”

He looks slightly surprised, and his smile grows to quasar when he remembers.

“Hi, San! You look really cute, I like the specs,” Yunho taps the corner of his eye just in case he couldn’t hear him well in the bustling city of this restaurant.

He was nearly too much for San, and he smiles so wide he has to look at the menu again.

"Th-thank you, Yunho."

“Can I get you two started with something?”

Wooyoung stays quiet, he only rests his head on his hands and looks at San, waits for him to order. He’s sweating; Wooyoung knows exactly what he’s doing and San wants to yell at him, but Yunho is here and he thinks of Mingi, so his urge to reach across the table and push Wooyoung off of his seat is diminished.

Only a little.

And he fucked up and ordered the Waterglass instead of an actual water _glass,_ and when Yunho’s writing it down he’s too nervous to correct him and thinks about how much money is going towards that one drink that he literally could have mixed himself at home.

This was a mistake.

“So, tell me about your...menu,” the word comes out of San’s mouth and it feels like copper on his tongue, at the fact that there was an exchange for money.

He feels dirty, but at the same time, he stopped knowing Wooyoung all that well to begin with, and he'd offered anyway.

Brought this on himself, typical.

“What do you want to know about?”

“How much does everything cost?”

“Hm. Dunno.” Wooyoung shrugs yet again, and San almost feels annoyed with how much he pushes wanting this to work, yet he’s flipping through his menu without a care in the world about Saturday. “Holding hands would be about...two bucks.”

“I don’t...I-I don’t think I’d like holding hands,” San remembers when he would hold Yeosang’s hands or Mingi’s, just to hold them, and he had been nervous then, even with his best friends.

But with Wooyoung? Absolutely not.

“Okay. We don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.”

Wooyoung’s looking up at him with his pretty shaped eyes and the fireflies are lighting up again, and the dim, amber lights above him make him look like the only boy in the world that San has ever seen, but yet, he still feels dark.

Wooyoung flips over his menu page, and it’s only when he speaks that San notices he’s staring at his silver hair and mustard shirt and pulls himself back into consciousness when he does.

“-sing.”

“What?”

“Kissing. How much would kissing be?” Wooyoung looks up at him, flicks his tongue of his lips in a way that has a crease lightly indenting his cheek, and San feels his heart drop.

“K-kissing?”

“Yeah, you know, like when you put your lips on someone else’s. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that before?” Wooyoung’s mouth grows into a small smile when San is quiet, one elbow on the tablecloth and he’s leaning into him.

San keeps quiet. He won’t tell him, then.

Wooyoung tsks, “San, baby, we’ve got a lot to learn.”

 _Baby._ This was going to be too much. San feels himself heating as if he had the sand dunes of the Lut sinking in his stomach and the winds of Venus under his skin. He was sweating, he felt so gross and that made him even more nervous because _what if he fucks up Hongjoong’s shirt?_

San swallows. _They’ve_ got a lot to learn?

Choi San is hopeless.


	8. wooyoung!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! 
> 
> enjoy pls c:

It’s the next day, exactly. San had been counting again (this time, the hours and minutes, but not the seconds), and he finds himself right here on Yeosang’s loveseat, 24 hours and about 11 minutes exact and hiding his face away from the others while they stayed in the kitchen.

Yeo had invited him and the rest over, because Wooyoung and their mother were both out of the house and Yeosang had a bunch of cookie dough from a fundraiser for the orchestra  in the back of the fridge that he couldn’t eat himself (well, he _could,_ but his mom said no).

And San had been involved in their conversation for the most part, but Yeosang quickly changed it from the project they were supposed to do over Thanksgiving break (and doing it the day right before school started up again) to Wooyoung as soon as he saw San had stopped talking.

San sighed.

“Yunho says that he served you two there,” Mingi says, shoving a cube of softened, chocolate chip cookie dough into his mouth once the cookie tray in front if him was [very] overfilled. “You went to the restaurant he works at. _Without me_ , but,” he shrugs, pushing the cookie tray into the oven, feeling its heat nearly singe off his eyebrows and making a face, “I’ll let it slide.”

“I didn’t know. Yunho is really nice, he gave us a discount when he could have gotten in trouble for it,” San says softly, playing with a stray thread in his black sock, the other one purple striped, but he had taken it off in Yeosang’s room somewhere and hadn’t come down with it, adding to the many lost socks that he’d strayed in this house alone.

When he thinks about yesterday, he gets fuzzy, as if his blood was teddy bear stuffing, and it makes him feel weird. And then he feels the corners of his lips threaten to stretch into flattery when he remembers Yunho’s nice compliment, or Wooyoung calling him that cursed word that he’d been deathly afraid of.

He presses his hands to his cheeks and thinks of ice.

“Do you think he likes you?” Seonghwa asks, pouring the small bottle of whole milk into his glass over quarterly melted ice cubes, stopping near the rim, voice soft in the otherwise momentarily quiet living room.

His heart is screaming at Seonghwa to stop thinking like that, and his mind is asking him to continue at the far fetched thought of someone like Jung Wooyoung even spitting in the same direction as someone like him, but he shakes his head furiously and sighs.

“Absolutely not. Wooyoung isn’t...he doesn’t like boys. He’s just doing it for the money, anyway.” San shakes his head again, doesn’t know if he’s trying to convince himself or Seonghwa and the way his fingers stretched out in a seriously _?_ from his oversized sweater when he hears that, and he kind of feels bad that they both know that money was the only reason why he was doing this rather than just a favor.

But he knows he shouldn’t because he offered to begin with.

Hm. _Money._

“He’s not gay? He’s willing to hold your hand and kiss you and call you _baby,_ but he’s not gay?” Mingi makes a face that he does when he’s about to laugh, and San hears the jest in his tone and he gets even more embarrassed, ducking his head a little more into the back of the loveseat.

“Bisexuals and pansexuals exist, despite the media,” Hongjoong says, popping a pinch of sugar cookie dough into his mouth as he goes through his routine of raiding the fridge, looks through the many leftovers and drinks and cheeses in Yeosang’s refrigerator after giving Hwa a glare when he follows him with _mmm_ , _we know._

“He hasn’t told me anything, but then again, we never talk about stuff like this. He doesn’t even know about Hwa.” San almost lets a giggle escape him as he sees Seonghwa’s expression and he can’t tell if he’s laughing or in pain, “I just know he’s had girlfriends in the past, but…” Yeosang shrugs, grabbing a warming cookie off of the plate in the middle of the island and going over to sit on the sofas connected in the corner of the wall, where San was.

“Wait, how old is Wooyoung?” Mingi asks, following Yeosang and lying down on the footrest, grabbing the remote control strewn carelessly onto the leather cushions and turns on the television.

San feels a bit better once he hears the ads of the anime channel that Yeosang had left on down here begin to talk up the empty spaces in his thoughts.

“Nineteen, turning twenty by the end of November,” San says, remembering their now two full-blown conversations and the details that Wooyoung thought weren’t important, but San wrote it down in his head.

“Ew, a cougar.” Hongjoong makes a face as he sits where the two couches connect, right near the window.

“He’s just doing it for the money...” San says this more to himself, and he rips the thread out of his sock and feels the opening tighten around his ankle when he does, twirling it around his pointer, “Hey, I wanna talk about Yunho.”

He didn’t, really. But it got the attention off of him and he knew Mingi liked the boy, so it worked for him and the rest of his friends, at least. And when Yeosang shushes them once My Hero is prompted back on the screen, his phone lights up, and the name suspended in the notification banner that flashes across the screen makes him break up into pixels. He holds a hand over the home button, feels of heat lightning under his palm, nearly forcing him to take his hand away before he gets shocked.

But he opens it anyway.

 **wooyoung:** _hi im rlly bored_

 **wooyoung:** _supposed to be paying attention to the lecture but!_

 **wooyoung:** _lets talk_

**_talk?_ **

**_about what_ **

**wooyoung:** _anything_

 **wooyoung:** _tell me what youre doing rn_

**_im texting you_ **

**wooyoung:** _ah very interesting_

**_im sorry_ **

**_i dont have anything to talk about_ **

**_im boring_ **

**wooyoung:** _u just gotta lighten up a little_

 **wooyoung:** _yesterday was really fun_

 **wooyoung:** _can i take you out again?_

**_no_ **

**wooyoung:** _whyyyy :(_

**_just dont want to_ **

**isnt that what people mean when they say no**

**wooyoung:** _its because im ugly isn’t it_

**_what?_ **

**_no not at all_ **

**wooyoung:** _so u think im hot_

**_WOOYOUNG_ **

**_pls pay attention to ur teacher_ **

**wooyoung:** _and if i dont???_

**_i uhhh_ **

**_i wont go out with you_ **

**_If u dont_ **

**_> :(_ **

**wooyoung:** _so if i do you’ll go out with me?_

**_no_ **

**wooyoung:** _u know i’m just gonna keep at it until you say yes_

**_why do you keep pushing this_ **

**_youre in it for the money right_ **

**_you didnt say anything about dates being on the list_ **

**_not getting paid for the date so why go on it_ **

**wooyoung:** _excellent points_

 **wooyoung:** _and tbh i dont rlly care about any of this_

 **wooyoung:** _im trying to help u, im not the one who lied to his mom about a boyfriend :/_

**_will u literally fuck off_ **

**_ugh_ **

**_dont try to take me out_ **

**wooyoung:** _suddenly i cant read so i’m taking you out anyway you cant say no_

**_no_ **

**wooyoung:** _:(_

San locks his phone and places it upside down, a thin wall of soundproof glass between him as his friends as they talk and he silently speaks to himself. They all know San was a dreamer, liked to think and wonder about the world, so when they see him looking at the window, they don’t say anything to him.

It was cute, their dynamics.

He watches the outside from the sliding glass door, squints his eyes and sees that the birds were calling and coming in and the sun washed the five of them in dusty topaz, as if the golden tokens of a pirate king’s chest was their home, and the slight irritation that came from Wooyoung’s text was draining through the silver needle laughter of Mingi and Seonghwa.

San thinks, looks at the leaves blowing against the grain of the kiss of the wind and suddenly he’s reminded of Wooyoung’s touches. Reminded of Wooyoung’s smile of sylvanshine during the nighttime, of his wild hair in the mornings and his deadly composure. He wonders about him.

And once his heart’s open and spilling blush into his cheeks, he stops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! this chapter was a little lame but things pick up a little later, the burn is slow but what's new i could never get to the point smh
> 
> i appreciate everything, thank u guys for taking ur time to read!
> 
> hopefully as i practice more i'll be able to write better for u guys! i know it's not that deep but still
> 
> \- love, mandi
> 
> p.s. i was gonna update w a few more chapters but iron deficiency is a bitch and she’s a mandi anti!!! pls dont give up on this!! i’ll update asap!! c:


	9. sunny alaska

It’s two days later, Thursday. 

San had gotten nervous about three times in the span of twenty-two minutes by the mere thought of Jung Wooyoung, and while he’s sitting in this freezing class and glancing out of the window to stare at the clouds and trees instead of the notebook he’s filled with the lecture in front of him (and some pretty poor doodles of the freckles Wooyoung has on his nose from about three different angles), he can’t stop thinking about him. About the way he smiled of crystal beaches and gentle breeze and how his laugh sounded of light bell chimes dancing with the doldrums of the sea.

But speak of the devil, and he definitely will appear.

It’s when he’s at lunch, but he’s only sipping on apple juice because he hates cafeteria food and doesn’t like eating sandwiches from the grocery store because the bread was too hard and scraped his mouth, as he’s listening to the conversations between Jongho and everyone else. 

He’d started sitting with them the Monday following the party, having stuck to Hongjoong at first, but quickly warming up to Mingi before San, then to Seonghwa with Yeosang last. He reminds San of sunny skies on a Sunday morning when you wake up and the birds are quiet and the Earth is silent just for you to open your eyes and think about the dreams you just had. And the way he grins of cloud iridescence and gentle glass beads makes San happier for the time being.

San liked Jongho.

“Hey, do you think your mom would let us go on a vacation together during the summer? With no parents?” Yeosang asks, spooning overcooked, clumpy wild rice into his mouth, grimacing but continuing to chew.

San knows exactly how he’s feeling, tasting flavorless goop and would be better off eating something like PVA glue.

“Maybe,” Mingi says, looking away from the addictive peek of his phone screen light for a moment, running a hand through prettily dyed green and blue tips in brunette hair and pushing his circle specs up his nose bridge.

“My mom is okay, but only of Yunho goes. Technically, he’s an adult.” Jongho nods, popping a melting, frozen green grape into his mouth, the plastic container frosted over from condensation.

“Yeah...All of you guys are eighteen, at least, except for me and Jongho. So, we have chaperones.  _ Technically.”  _ San says, remembering that his birthday was literally a week away, feeling kind of guilty that he wasn’t excited for the grand age of 18, despite his mom pushing for him to have a party, go on vacation,  _ something. _

He’d rather stay home, play Undertale, maybe watch a movie and sleep. He drowns out Jongho and Mingi, Yeosang and Hongjoong and Seonghwa again when he hears the conversation shift from vacation to Yunho (despite Jongho’s protests to  _ stop talking about my brother like that, it’s gross!)  _ and instead takes his time thinking into the table underneath his apple juice carton. He remembers he has a history test tomorrow that he’s most likely going to flunk, and math homework that still needs about three problems done. Just when he thought he didn’t have to worry about anything for the rest of the day.

He hated school.

“What the hell? Wooyoung?”

San doesn’t think he hears Yeosang correctly, maybe he was just being weird and heard things because Wooyoung had literally been on his mind the entire day. He looks at him, and Yeosang breaks his stare from behind him to give him a look and gestures to behind his shoulder. When he glances behind him and sees silver hair settled on darkened roots and pretty shaped eyes looking down at him, and a glossy, halcyon smile that made San’s heart butterfly in his chest, he can’t help but color and look at Wooyoung’s shoes.

“Hi. I brought you this,” San is confused, looks up again to see Wooyoung holding a brown paper bag, a little crumpled at the very top and San could tell Wooyoung spent a few tries of folding it down properly.

He smiles.

There are a few people around them taking glances at this new kid, probably wondering why his hair is silver or why he’s got a chain in his pocket connected to his belt or so many dangly earrings. Wooyoung’s got his thumb in the loops of his jeans as he holds out the bag for San, a grin that reminds him of melted saccharine popsicles on his lips.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” San asks softly as he takes the bag, concerned and really hoping that Wooyoung hadn’t-

“No. Our first-period teacher didn’t come in today, so he canceled. I have class in about twenty minutes, thought I’d stop by to drop off lunch for you. Cafeteria food here is fucking gross, Yeosang knows.”

“For once in his life, he’s correct,” Yeosang says as he shovels more rice into his mouth, seemingly the only one willing to speak.

San notices everyone else was quiet just then, Mingi glancing at Wooyoung just the same as the girls at the table across from theirs, Jongho is on his phone and Hongjoong is having an exceptionally hard time peeling a banana, studying the fruit as if he was trying to crack a special berry code. He looks at Seonghwa, who gives him a tiny smile of encouragement when he sees San flush roseate.

“Well, th-thank you.” San’s voice is quiet penumbra as he looks down, is sure there is steam coming out his ears from how hot his face feels.

“Of course. Have a good day, okay?” 

And it’s only when Wooyoung presses his lips to his cheek from behind him that he wants to explode. He’s a blushing mess, and he looks at Wooyoung with a near scowl only to receive a wink laced with childish mischief in his eyes, and San wants to push him again. Push him right down to the ground for making him feel like bubbles made up his chest and his heart was a bundle of feathers.

He places a cold hand on his cheek, and Mingi erupts in a smirk.

“That is one fine, gay man if I’ve ever seen one.”

San hides his face in his hands as he’s showered in giggles by his friends, nearly about to cry with how embarrassing that was. Though he knows why Wooyoung’s doing it - and he finds it really sweet - all of that in public? 

Whew.

Even worse, is when he finds a little note taped to the plastic wrapping of a turkey club sandwich (and Wooyoung cut the crusts off and split it into triangles, the little asshole), written in thick ink and his pretty, slim handwriting that looks like it belongs on the cracked concrete walls of the alleyways.

_ so how about that second date, baby? _

...

**wooyoung:** _ hey u should smile more _

**wooyoung:** _ ur dimples are cute _

**_i hate them_ **

**_i hate smiling bc theyre so ugly_ **

**wooyoung:** _ ugly??? san i think you might be on crack  _

**wooyoung:** _ anyone with dimples is automatically cute and thats a proven scientific fact  _

**_pls never do that again_ **

**_that lunch thing_ **

**wooyoung:** _ well u see that’s impossible _

**wooyoung:** _ ive made a list of things to do for you to get more comfortable with this whole fake dating thing like i told u _

**wooyoung:** _ that was one out of 9 _

**_seems like i was skipped when they were passing out cute genes_ **

**_got stuck with these ugly dimples >:(_ **

**_wait what_ **

**_9??_ **

**_what are you doing_ **

**_stop planning bad stuff like this_ **

**wooyoung:** _ ill also find ways to make you smile more baby _

**_dont call me that_ **

**wooyoung:** _ okay then ill call u sunny alaska since a bright smile from u is rare _

**wooyoung:** _ like the sun on a winter solstice  _

**_hey >:(_ **

**_i smile sometimes_ **

**_that name is unfitting_ **

**_i do not approve_ **

**wooyoung:** _ whatever u say sunny alaska _


	10. wooyoung is wine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys i played my first gig today and i screwed up the bassline and got sad so! i wrote some chapters for u hehe
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> p.s. pls excuse my excessive use of the word sigh in this chapter :/

“You’re back again? I already brought you food today. Don’t we have like, four days left?” Wooyoung is grumpy again, and his hair is a mess and he’s got indents in his forehead from the pillow fabric he’d been sleeping on.

San swallows, nearly shivers with how cold the room has gotten suddenly and he feels like he’s lost in the woods at night. He’d knocked, taking heed to Yeosang’s warning that Wooyoung might be sleeping. So after calling his name half a decibel louder each time, the same fear of waking a sleeping lion making a home in his stomach, he gets him up.

In a shitty mood, but at least he’s up.

“N-no. We have...t-two days. I just need to know the plan. It’s...only for Saturday, then I’ll l-leave you alone.”

San feels like a child in trouble at school, he’s got his feet together and he’s playing with the ends of his sleeves because he got nothing else to do and the spotlights are almost too bright now. He doesn’t know what to do or how to act, never really bothering Wooyoung when he’s sleeping for this reason.

Wooyoung sighs heavily, like a deflated tire, and rubs at his milky eyes, tired.

“Do you want to go out or stay here?” His voice is lower and gentler, like sanded wood, and San eases up just a bit.

“Here. It’s...easier.”

Wooyoung nods and lets his arms fall into his lap, and he’s staring at San. San is silent, and it’s then when Wooyoung scoots back and gestures to his bed as if it was the most obvious thing in the world for San to come over.

“Sit.”

San goes towards the bed, feels the small alloy pull gripping at his skin, and he sits right in front of Wooyoung, crossing his legs just the same and nearly suffocating with the nerves that. He probably looks scared in front of him, but he feels like he’s floating freely in space and there’s a black hole somewhere here. If he gets stuck in it, when would he get out?

And he really should be used to it - stagnant in Wooyoung’s meridian, but he doesn’t think he ever will. His heart’s in his throat but he crosses both of his legs under him and presses his clammy hands against his joggers.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Saturday, my mom asks to be there around five thirty...” San has a tough time remembering much else when he thinks of it, seeing the sunlight slash across brown eyes that flash like flames, golden specs of fallen leaves against an amber pool.

Wooyoung shrugs. “Okay.”

_Okay, okay._

“What else?”

“I don’t have anything else at the moment.”

Wooyoung sighs lightly through his nose, and San’s misty again as he stares at Wooyoung’s tile, looks at the marble and how it compares to Yeosang’s tile, how opposite the two were.

And with that, he thinks that this is as awkward as the two could get, with Wooyoung’s glare burning craters into his skin and the atmosphere almost as smothering as the waves.

“Your birthday is soon. You doing anything?” Wooyoung asks, pushing himself up a bit to be closer to San, their knees touching and San involuntarily tenses.

He doesn’t know how he’s not going into a panic. He feels like he’s lying in the salt of the ocean, like he’s next to a riptide and it was only a matter of time before he floats too close and gets himself in trouble. He sighs, his heart going numb inside his chest and his nerves making their way to his head and settling in his fingers.

“N-no. Not this year. Yeosang suggested one of us have a party but...I’d rather stay home and sleep.” San says, thinking of himself with a ridiculous, pointy birthday hat on and blushing under the chorus of happy birthdays thrown his way, and he smiles to himself, but then he thinks again. “How did you know it was my birthday?”

“San, you practically live at my house. We used to be friends, remember? I didn’t forget anything about you, we just fell out of touch.” Wooyoung chuckles as he looks to his legs covered by the comforter as if something was clouding his memories and he was going back to it.

San swallows, nodding.

“Y-yeah. I do.”

San thinks back to the time when they were kids, and Yeosang had fallen out of the big oak tree and fractured his ankle, and he was really tired from helping Yeosang stand upright and wait for his mom to rush over and take him to the hospital from their house, and Wooyoung sat all the way in the backseat with San because Yeosang wanted him to come, and he told him how cool he was for doing that for his little brother.

Or another time, when Wooyoung and San were home alone together when he was fourteen and waiting for Yeosang and his mom to get back because he’d fallen out of the big oak tree _again,_ and they were deciding on a movie to watch but San had noticeably been drowning him out, thinking about Yeosang and how he might be doing at the hospital, and Wooyoung told San he was going to call him Spacehead because he was always dreaming and never paid attention to important things such as this.

Stupid things like that.

“Spacehead, remember?” Wooyoung asks, and the air is warm and his voice floats like a balloon against the clouds as San glances at the beginnings of a hangnail on his middle finger.

“Ew. Yes. I’m so glad you...” San smiles and shakes his head, “didn’t go through with that.”

“Sixteen-year-old me was so ugly. Never learned to grow up.” Wooyoung wrinkles his nose and San shrugs.

“You weren’t bad at all. Nicer back then.”

Wooyoung leans against his headboard with a face of disinterest, making San even more nervous and he practically hears him say he doesn’t give a shit with the way his mouth moves in a tight-lipped twitch.

He shrugs, too.

“Whatever. Do you need anything else? If not, get out.”

“C-can we...” San swallows and begins shaking his foot underneath him like he does when he’s trying to fall asleep but he’s too nervous about something to do so. “Can we practice?”

“Practice what?” Wooyoung is looking at him that tells San that he already knows exactly what he’s talking about, and San didn’t even notice that he was nervously playing with his fingers again under his penetrating stare.

“You know what I mean,” he feels hot again as he stares at the pretty shapes the window blinds were making on his joggers and Wooyoung’s black comforter rather than the smugness that made a home in his smirk.

“You wanna practice...playing guitar? I have a really cheap one in my closet. I didn’t know you were into mus-”

“No. You know what I mean. It’s…” San sighs, rolls his eyes towards the ceiling. “Practice the stuff that people do when they date.”

San’s beginning to color even heavier.

“Have conversations? We don’t really need to...well, actually-”

“Oh, my _god_. I’ll look up how to do it on Youtube.”

Wooyoung chuckles when San gets up, but he quickly feels him grab his wrist and pull him back almost too hard, but he’s lying with his back pressed against the bed an the warm sunlight beams streaking across his cheek with huge question marks in his head and hollow winds in his chest.

“Let’s practice holding hands first. Since this is your first time.”

San sighs, takes a moment to sit up, giving Wooyoung a glare but it’s quickly shattered by his dreamboat eyes, and he’s in front of him again, this time, with one leg crossed under the one dangling off of the mattress.

Thinks of it as a quick escape route.

Wooyoung holds up his hand, and San looks at it, tries not to pay attention to his messy silver hair or his bare body or the waistband of his joggers that were a little too big slacking down beneath the covers. He holds it, like how he does with Yeosang and Seonghwa and Mingi sometimes, and Wooyoung grimaces.

“Ew, not like that, you dingus. You just put your fingers through mine.” Wooyoung says, straightening out his fingers a little for emphasis, and San tries to slip his hand into his and the coldness of it is like Oymyakon against heated skin, and he makes a face.

“I don’t like it.”

Wooyoung blinks at him for a second, and holds out one pinky instead after he’s done. San’s eyebrows come together, but Wooyoung gestures to it and he humors him anyway, hooks his own pinky around it.

“Better?”

It is, only a little because it’s not like he has too much commitment here. And he nods, finally.

“Okay, good. We’ll make that one dollar instead.”

San sighs. Of course, there was a way to ruin it. It feels like he’d stuck a fork in the outlet he likes to plug his chargers into, and he takes his hand away from Wooyoung.

“It costs a whole dollar? For that? We held pinkies for like, three seconds.” San realizes how stupid it sounds as soon as it comes out of his mouth, wants to jump out of the window again because _that was so, so fucking lame to say_.

He can’t, but his mind jumped out yet again, this time, with a running start.

Wooyoung tilts his head that silently spoke to San, telling him that it did. A whole dollar for holding pinkies.

San rolls his eyes.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Well, since our date? About three. I kissed your face twice.”

“Face kisses cost money, too? Wooyoung, you’re…” San shakes his head once and his eyes avert to the covers as he thinks about how much money this would turn out for him, “you’re gonna run me dry.”

“Don’t hate the player.”

“Just keep a tab, I won’t remember this.”

“Trust me, I will.” Wooyoung smiles almost annoyingly, but San refrains from rolling his eyes. “Anything else? You’re disrupting daily Wooyoung time.”

San makes a face. _Wooyoung time._

“Uh. About the other thing, I’ll just…” It’s right then that San feels himself falling back down into the ball pit of nerves and anxieties and boiling embarrassment bubbling over the rim. “I’ll just look it up on Google.”

“You’re gonna learn how to kiss on Google? Really? I’m right here.” Wooyoung is looking at San like he’s an idiot, and he avoids eye contact by staring at the covers again.

San’s heart drops as if he’s been caught on some illegal sites or something, and his face flushes and he feels of the red-blue machine gun fire of police lights. “Google. I’m good for now, thank you.”

“San, baby. I’ll never understand you.” Wooyoung shakes his head as San begins to get up.

“Don’t call me that. I’ll see you later.” San’s words run together like a sink faucet, and he goes over to the door as quickly yet as calmly as he can, resulting in this weird slow-fast groove that had him at Wooyoung’s door before the older boy had finished his sentence.

“-mistake. Sorry, Sunny.”

San groans.

“It’s San!”

“It’s My Baby! The Love of my Life! My One and Onl-”

San closes the door on Wooyoung, and his voice is muffled out but he’s still shouting stupid things behind the wood. Then he remembers their texts yesterday and how Wooyoung brought him lunch, and he can help but ponder of the rainbow slivers, and he colors a deeper shade of pink he didn’t know was allowed for him. He practically runs down the dark hallway to Yeosang’s room and shuts the door loudly behind him, starling him and making him drop his controller onto the tile.

“For fuck’s sake, San!”

“Wooyoung is making me feel weird.” San ignores the fright in Yeosang’s eyebrows and allows himself to catch his breath as if Wooyoung’s room was a quarantine.

“What? _Weird?_ Did he say something nasty?”

_“Sang.”_

“What happened?” Yeosang pauses his game and puts the controller to the side of the beanbag, back on the floor, getting ready to hear whatever dramatized situation San managed to get himself into within the two hours he’d been here.

“He suggested we practiced kissing but I wanted to practice holding hands first, and…”

He trails off when he sees Yeosang’s eyes glinting and his lips curl upwards. He watched as a smile grows huge on his lips and he covers his mouth, and his eyes squint up and he realizes he’s laughing at him.

“You wanted to practice _holding hands?”_

_“Yeosang!”_

He sighs through a smile, shaking his head once.

“San, you need to get laid. Do you want to go to a party this weekend? So that you can get laid?”

San wants to _scream._

“You’re gonna give me a heart attack. A terrible help you are.”

“I just work here.” Yeosang shrugs, although thoroughly entertained with how easy it was to really, _really_ mess with San.

“I’m screwed. I should have kissed him.”

“Ew, can you stop talking to me about kissing my brother?”

 _“Sang!”_ San feels like a whiny child, but he has this feeling of irritation in his chest that he can’t shake and he needs to get out somehow.

He can’t yell, because Yeosang’s mom got frightened easily and would probably call the cops thinking he was dying or something. Can’t keep whining to Yeosang because what was he supposed to do? Couldn’t complain to his mom for...obvious reasons.

He was stuck.

“San, baby, come here.”

He nearly throws up. He’s gotten so sensitive to that word that he grimaces, nearly triggers his gag reflex, but then he remembers that it’s Yeosang so he goes over to him anyway. He sits right in front of him on the bean bag chair, seeing a dust bunny a few inches away from Yeosang’s feet and points at it. He takes it and shoves it behind the beanbag, right in the space between the wall and the chair.

“You gotta give it time. Think of this relationship as…” Yeosang stops the little strokes through San’s light brown hair as he thinks for a moment, before continuing. “As a good cheese. Good cheeses are aged right?”

San shakes his head, looking through the disco ball glitter curtains and how it turned the mint walls citrus in the afternoon sunlight, and how Yeosang smelled of strawberries and lemons because he never liked any other shampoo, too harsh on his scalp, he says. “The more cheese ages the nastier it tastes.”

 _“Okay,_ wine. A fine wine. And then the day of the dinner is when you pop off the cork and take a sip of that wine that you spent all this time aging. It’s gonna work out. Don’t try and drink your wine too early, man. Age it.”

San shakes his head and sighs.

“Yeosang, I hate you. I’m going home. Goodnight.” San literally slides off of Yeosang’s lap because of the weird angle that crossed legs on a bean bag chair produced, body aching slightly as the cold tile seeps into his clothes, before getting up and walking towards the door.

“Yes, go home. It’s nearly your bedtime.”

“It’s seven pm!”

“Are you talking back to me?” Yeosang’s eyebrows come together in mock-scorn, and San sighs for the nth time that day, lightly pushing Yeosang’s shoulder.

“Screw you, goodbye.”

“Bye, Sannie! See you tomorrow!”

And on the short, forty-five-second walk back to his house, he can’t help but feel that Yeosang might be starting to make some sense. He tells himself that he was probably just constantly shitting his pants over nothing, really, and to calm down. He looks up and collects all of his thoughts in the whispers of the moon and shade of the starglow and calms himself down, thinks of Yeosang’s words some more, and doesn’t try to plan ahead this time.

Everything would work out.

Give it time.

Age it.

Wooyoung is wine.

Hm.


	11. ignite it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also!!! i really hope this doesn't come off as annoying or anything like that, but! i just want to say - thank you guys so so much for all of your sweet comments! idk if yall know how much i appreciate everything :< some of u guys have been sending me cc and dms apart from leaving comments, and HOLY SHIT THEY ARE TOO KIND
> 
> thank you so much!! it inspired me to keep writing, so really, thank you c: yall deserve the world <33
> 
> enjoy!

It’s on a rainy Friday afternoon when San is thinking.

The rain hits him softly, kisses of wet tears on the sighs of his warmed skin, and it’s slightly uncomfortable because it was cold, but all the while, he was okay. The leaves above him resonate slow claps, and the drops landed on his jeans as the water from the branch below him soaked into the denim. He has his eyes shut, feels the rain slide down his face and through his hair and over his lips. As he leans his body against the trunk of the oak tree, he lets himself float into the grey ashes of the smoky sky, into the navy atmosphere and past the moon’s graceful fingers and out of the universe’s umbra embrace.

San’s been to space more times than he could count lately, and he thinks that’s insane.

“Sunny? What are you doing out here? It’s raining.”

His rocket ship had taken off now, circling the orbit he had grown used to. He blinks under his eyelids, feeling the kick start engine go off in his chest and suddenly, he’s nervous.

“I like thinking. In the rain, I mean. Helps.”

“Please come inside. You’re going to get cold.”

He was right. Once the rain stopped, San knew he would be plagued with ice beneath his skin and sick shivers of a hypothermic ruse.

But that was a problem for one-hour-from-now San.

Still, something about the levulose rings of Wooyoung’s voice and the rocky concern makes San want to move and meet him inside.

He doesn’t.

“It’s nice. Come here...sit with me.”

“San-”

“Come~.”

Wooyoung sighs, and San hears shuffling and the shout of the window being opened further, and soon there’s warmth pressed to his side, like the embers of a fireplace in December. He feels Wooyoung’s hands next to his thighs as he holds on to the branch, legs dangling below him. San keeps his eyes closed, but his train of thought is severed completely and he’s derailing, buzzing next to Wooyoung as if he were the flashes of a retro neon sign of a tiki bar.

“How does this help you think? It’s wet and the water from the branches is seeping into my butt.”

San’s lips twitch slightly in a smile at that, but it quickly goes away with his next thought.

“You have to be quiet. It helps.”

The sound of the rain lightly pressing its pretty, glossed fingertips over the umbrella leaves and the sponge branches make San drift. He’s wading through the tides of the Nanuya Levu yet again, struggling a bit from the currents Wooyoung is pulling in, but he manages to relish in the cool ripples at his feet and the excitement of the unknown in the offing where the sun meets the reaching hands of the ocean.

He loves being here.

“So, the dinner is tomorrow. Do you think we’ll be ready?”

Oh. San stepped on a crab.

He opens his eyes and throws one leg over the huge branch so that he’s facing Wooyoung, and shrugs, banking his focus in the mirror streets and depressed trees across the sidewalk. He leans against the trunk again, not minding the soak of the rainwater into his back.

“I guess so,” San remembers what Yeosang had told him, and doesn’t say anything about the extensive (no, really, _extensive)_ research he did about how couples act.

Holding hands, hugging, making the other feel loved and appreciated, the works.

“Kissing.”

“Wh-what?”

“Kissing. We didn’t practice that.” Wooyoung throws a leg over the branch as well, hands pressed against the wood, and San breaks eye contact to see the reflection of the emerald leaves painted in the silver rings adorning his fingers, feeling a little funny.

San smiles softly again, resonating with the bird’s calls and the murmurs of rain against the leaves above them.

“If you want a kiss from me so bad, just-”

“Can I kiss you?”

The way Wooyoung’s eyes are twinkling still in the ash of the sky reminds San of darkening sunset. The 18th degree of the twilight sun nearly dimming - this time, in the rain - put out, yet still shining, of deep gold embers and violet marble and San thinks he’ll never compare to something as brilliant as that.

His eyes push to the comely cursive font on the front of Wooyoung’s black jumper, finding warm hands and comforting hugs on the curves of the soft accents as he thinks about what he said, and suddenly, he feels of cotton.

“Okay.”

Wooyoung peers down at him, has his chin right on two of his fingers and making him look up. They’re stuck for a minute, caged in the invisible boundaries that San spent a while setting up, and he’s so incredibly nervous that he stays still, and his heart is antimatter in his chest, timid and filling. Wooyoung presses his thumb to the bottom of San’s lower lip, creating a pigment of goosebumps to be painted on his canvas, shoving him further into the pull and even closer to his sun, and the bouquet of petrichor and fragrant remnants of Wooyoung’s perfume slips him into subconscious and he closes his eyes once he sees Wooyoung lean closer to him.

When he kisses him today, San warms of alpenglow. He feels on top of the highest mountain, of rose and deep oranges when he kisses him, like he was made of expensive, opulent threads and was tailored just for Wooyoung to iron out under his fingertips, for him to press his lips to. Wooyoung reminds San of a flare today, a brilliant speck on an otherwise boring background, and San feels lucky to be pressed against him, in a somewhat vulnerable state, protected by the stars.

San’s skin was red phosphorus as Wooyoung slid matchbox fingertips to the side of San’s throat, makes his heart erupt in fireworks of curiosity and desires, and he feels of that same balloon against the cotton clouds on Sunday morning.

Wooyoung kisses him again, and again, and with the press of apprehensive candy lips against his own, the rain drummed harder on heated skin. As if he was made of thin glass, Wooyoung keeps steady, gentle hands on his waist and San’s chest flutters so much that he can’t help but break it once realization caught up to him and his pride and his confidence, wild rouge on his cheeks as he looks at Wooyoung’s face, at his lips and nose and cheeks, anywhere but his eyes.

“Never kissed anyone before, huh?”

San groans, hides his face in the crook of Wooyoung’s neck, feels even smaller when he hears chuckles against his hair.

He doesn’t know if he would be able to manage if Wooyoung kept this up. He thinks of Yeosang, and it’s when the rain is clogging his ears and dripping off his nose and making him feel soggy and gross that the fact of the dinner being tomorrow sets in. Less than one day away.

San starts counting from now.


	12. bubs and sunny vs mama choi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AH HELLO WELCOME
> 
> it's been a huge gap however! i've been writing andddd despite me wanting this au to be shorter i've written 15 more chapters on top of the 11 here my headassery is exceptional
> 
> thank you for sticking around!! if ur still here i lov u pls have fun with this ^-^
> 
> p.s. follow me on twt! dm me @lightbugyeo let's be friends all of u guys are super sweet :((((
> 
> p.p.s. i didn't realize how much of a TRAINWRECK this fic was like a lot of things didn't have continuity from like the first couple chaps and when i read over it i was like ???? who am i omg so, sorry for the spelling mistakes, continuity errors, slips, etc. this fic still needs a lot of work and i'm still trying to improve so pls punch me in the face if u see an error!! i'm always going back and fixing them i need a beta but anyway
> 
> enjoy c:

**wooyoung:** _san baby calm down_

 **wooyoung:** _i got this_

 **wooyoung:** _im very good with women_

**_you are terrible with women_ **

(San peeks out of his bedroom window, the sliver of sidewalk right in front of Wooyoung’s house obscured almost obscenely by the branches of the big oak tree and his thin curtains. He doesn’t know how many times he’s looked out of his window since his analog clock hit 4pm, waiting for any sign of the peppy walk of Wooyoung or the blur of pretty silver hair passing his line of sight. He’s shaking, feels the chilly waterfall sting of nerves trickle down his shoulders and stomach and legs and feet once he sees Wooyoung’s texted him again.)

 **wooyoung:** _omg u see right through me!_

 **wooyoung:** _wait_

 **wooyoung:** _call me a name really quick_

 **wooyoung:** _right now_

**_what_ **

**_why_ **

**_what for_ **

**_a name???_ **

**wooyoung:** _just do it!!_

**_stupid bitch_ **

**_like that?_ **

**wooyoung:** _OMG NO_

 **wooyoung:** _LIKE A PET NAMEJRNFISND_

**_OHSIDNDKKEKD_ **

**_IM SO EMBARRASSED_ **

**_OMG_ **

**_DJNDIDNSKD_ **

**_UHUH_ **

**_LIKE_ **

**_idk bubs?? i like that name_ **

**wooyoung:** _okay now use it in a sentence_

**_wOOYOUNG_ **

**wooyoung:** _DO ITTT_

**_ugh_ **

**_hibubshowwasyourday_ **

**wooyoung:** _i’m sorry could u repeat that_

**_i cannot deal with this_ **

**_ugh_ **

**_hi bubs how was your day_ **

**_uGh_ **

**wooyoung:** _good thank you for asking_

 **wooyoung:** _i want u to call me that so its easier_

 **wooyoung:** _greet me_

**_uhh_ **

**_bubs_ **

**_u gotta be here by 5:30_ **

**wooyoung:** _okay baby_

 **wooyoung:** _keep this up baby okay?_

(San grimaces, feeling sick because he really hated showing affection in literally any situation, not to mention being put on the spot to call him _pet names,_ shaky fingers halting over the buttons.)

**_ugh_ **

**_disgusting_ **

**_but okay_ **

**_bub_ **

**_b u b_ **

**_bububububububub_ **

**_wooyoung i hate this_ **

**_how will it help??_ **

**wooyoung:** _it’ll make it easier for u to call me pet names in front of ur mom_

 **wooyoung:** _so that it sounds convincing at least_

 **wooyoung:** _do u want me to come early_

**_no say u broke your leg and cant make it today_ **

**wooyoung:** _san that will never work_

 **wooyoung:** _i’ll say i died_

**_KSSNJDND_ **

**_THAT WONT WORK EITHER_ **

**_WOOYOUNG IM NERVOUS_ **

**wooyoung:** _YOU?? ME!!_

 **wooyoung:** _ive never met parents before except for my mom_

 **wooyoung:** _what if she doesnt like the pie i brought!_

**_you brought pie._ **

**_u rlly brought a pie._ **

**_just when i thought u couldnt get any cheesier than a kiss in the rain_ **

**_u bring_ **

**_pie_ **

**wooyoung:** _shut up >:( _

**wooyoung:** _now you’ll be comfortable kissing me anytime_

 **wooyoung:** _wooyoung - 1_

 **wooyoung:** _san - 0_

**_omg shut up_ **

**_i will literally never kiss u again_ **

**_ill rip my lips off_ **

**wooyoung:** _odd flex but okay_

 **wooyoung:** _plus after today u wont need to kiss me anymore so!_

(Oh, yeah. San forgot about that. Today was it, for both of them.)

 **wooyoung:** _its nearly 5:30_

 **wooyoung:** _im gonna piss myself_

 **wooyoung:** _what if i stutter in front of her_

 **wooyoung:** _what if i drop the mashed potatoes when she passes them over_

 **wooyoung:** _wait is she even making potatoes????_

 **wooyoung:** _what if i look ugly_

 **wooyoung:** _and shes like “ew my son is dating this rat??? repulsive”_

**_IM SCREAMING_ **

**_what happened to not caring about this whole thing huh_ **

**wooyoung:** _listen that was before_

 **wooyoung:** _its not good to dwell in the past santhony_

 **wooyoung:** _im coming now_

 **wooyoung:** _omg_

**_SANTHONY IM SICK_ **

**wooyoung:** _san i dont think i could do this_

 **wooyoung:** _like i know its just ur mom_

 **wooyoung:** _i’m terrified that i’m gonna mess it up for you_

**_wooyoung_ **

**_calm down_ **

**_i’ll be there with u, okay??_ **

**_its just my mom_ **

**_shes cool_ **

**_sometimes_ **

**_hmm not really_ **

**_shes kind of a cunt ok_ **

**_but thats not important_ **

**_i bet u look great_ **

**_u always do!!_ **

**_i’ll be with u_ **

**_we’re in this together_ **

**_bubs and sunny vs mama choi_ **

**_dont worry!!_ **

**wooyoung:** _san baby i love u_

**_sHUT UP_ **

**_i’ll see u soon_ **

**_bubs :)_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO DID YALL SEE THOSE HWA PICS EXPECT A MERMAN SEONGI AU SOON!


	13. got a beautiful face but got nothing to say

San’s standing here, stomach filled with knots and ears clogged with the heavy beats of his chest, frozen with his hand on the doorknob when he sees Wooyoung had decided to wear _this_ outfit today.

He sees he had decided to wear a dark button up with the first few buttons undone, long, pretty golden chains against a tanned chest and a big belt in the loops of dark pants, standing at the doorway as if he was the only man in the world allowed to pull off something such as this, as if he was marveled ore in the deepest underground. San would have believed it.

He thinks black is Wooyoung’s most dangerous color, thinks of a stormy night on the eastern side of the Andes Mountains and how much he reminded him of the rain.

He can’t really think of words to say, too caught up in Wooyoung, Wooyoung, and more Wooyoung to try it. His face goes pink as he realizes how time had nearly stopped between the two of them, and he could practically hear the blood rush into his cheeks. He thinks it’s dumb how he nearly can’t breathe just at the sight of Wooyoung in clothes that were a bit fancier than usual, and Wooyoung can’t help but break into a shy smile under San’s awestruck gaze.

San doesn’t realize how much he could break down Wooyoung’s confidence and have him the most self-conscious under his stare, but Wooyoung probably would never tell him that.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” He says to him, and he smiles wider when San points his eyes to the ground, thinks he looks pretty in his floral silky shirt and peachy pigment fluttered onto his eyeline to match the flush adorning his cheeks.

San turns his attention on Wooyoung’s hands, sees that he’s clutching a reusable bag, the same silver rings on his fingers and confident shadows as yesterday.

_Oh, jeez. Yesterday._

San colors some more.

“S-shut up. You…” he sighs, feels like such an idiot because he can’t even speak, his voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “Shush.”

Wooyoung moves his eyes away from San for a moment, sees his mom moving around the kitchen, wiping her hands in a black hand towel as she disappears somewhere outside of his sight. He predicts (okay, fine - he _hopes)_ that she’s going to come out to greet them, and Wooyoung quickly steps forward, places his free hand on San’s waist.

San feels of red stoplights.

Wooyoung lightly kisses his forehead right as San’s mom walks in, feels how warm he had gotten in the span of just ten minutes, and he can’t help but smile again against his skin.

“Hi, baby, how’s everything?” He asks, looks at San as if he was the only one here, gives him the warmest smile, enough to knock the breath out of him and make his pigeon petal heart soar. “Ms. Choi, how are you?”

San’s mom gives him a polite grin and wipes her dry hands on the apron she had tied around her waist. San moves out of the way a bit for her to get to him, and thank _god,_ it gave him time to breathe or something before the dinner.

“Hello, Wooyoung! I’m San’s mother, it’s very nice to meet you.” San makes a face when he sees a smile that his mom only puts on for her company’s annual banquets in the fall, sees her hug him softly and kiss near his cheek, but he hides it away from her because he felt disrespectful. “Dinner’s almost done, but I just wanted to introduce myself before we eat. Make yourself comfortable, okay? The food will be out shortly. San, go show him your room or something.”

She takes the bag that he handed her and goes away again, back into the confines of the kitchen, and Wooyoung finally gets inside the house and shuts the door behind him. He gives San a nervous smile, and it’s then when San remembers that Wooyoung actually was a regular person and _not_ a dream’s creation, remembers how anxious he was for being here and meeting his mom, remembers that he had the same nervous thoughts about this just as he did.

Jung Wooyoung. Anxious. Hm.

“I’m kinda scared, Sunny.” Wooyoung lowers his voice to a harsh whisper once he gets into San’s room, not even bothering to look around at the hand-painted band logos San had made years ago because he couldn’t resist a plain, white wall, nor the fairy lights strung around the trim, nor the collection of vinyl cd’s decorating his walls like the record store itself, nothing.

San smiles when he hears that, looking at Wooyoung and sitting down on his bed, right in front of him where he stopped in the middle of his room.

“I know. Me too.” And he does know; he sees it in the way he’s studying his nose.

Wooyoung is thinking, hard enough to not keep eye contact. He could always tell; he tended to do that, whenever he wasn’t really here.

San kept it in his back pocket.

The two are silent, now. San’s sat on the edge of his mattress, kicking his feet back and forth because dinner was about to start and _good god,_ he’s been dreading this for a week and a half day. He looks up at Wooyoung, just standing there and reading him as if there was script on his skin and ink on his lips.

“W-why are you...staring? Like that?” San feels coy again, looks at his feet swinging and tries his best not to color again.

“You look very pretty. As always.”

“ _Wooyoung,_ don’t say stuff like that!” He nearly pouts in embarrassment. “My mom is downstairs.”

Wooyoung grins, finds San very endearing. And with the dimness in the bedroom lights above them of the living room shadowing the pretty curves of San’s cheeks and the tiny dents in his nose, he can’t help but feel as if he was made of onshore breezes.

San’s mom had called the two in for dinner when the sun had finally set warm orange pigments and violet hues across the canvas of the cotton candy clouds, interrupting their very important conversation of a tiger’s outcome fighting a hummingbird or leafcutter ants, and despite San literally eating at the dining table every day, he can’t help but feel like he doesn’t belong. He doesn’t really want to be here, sitting in front of his mom with Wooyoung right to his left.

It just seemed out of place.

It seemed very, very out of place, to be comfortable around his mom, with himself. With the _g-word_. Maybe he won’t have to bleep it anymore.

“So, how long have you two been together again?”

And San doesn’t think he could get any warmer. So far, the questions have been about Wooyoung. Where he works, where he goes to college, what he’s studying, stuff like that. To say this simple question pushed him into arctic water was an understatement. San doesn’t answer, and Wooyoung feels San lightly tug at his pants, telling him to go ahead and do it for him.

“Three months, ma’am.”

San drinks his water, ice melted and causing condensation to cry down the sides, fingers almost slipping. With enough time, they fell into smooth, slightly-less-effortful conversations, San bringing up what happened during lunch, Wooyoung bringing up what happened at the beach. As far as San knew, he’d never been to the beach with Wooyoung, but the two were so good at bouncing off one another’s blatant lies that San’s mom believed it. So it was okay.

It seemed as if they really had been together for three months, rather than barely a week.

San’s mom had taken all the plates away, San’s tummy aching a bit because he had too much pie, but that’s the price you pay for being a crackhead for sugar, he supposed. They’re outside now, San hiding his face in a giggling Wooyoung’s arms and trying to come down from the embarrassment he suffered from his mom going on a rant of _how nice it was to see San this happy, continue whatever you’re doing with him and come again soon!_

San was worried that she meant it, that she really did want Wooyoung to come back and he’d have to keep pestering him with this.

“San, stop,” he smiles, finding how easily San got embarrassed impressively hilarious, letting go and looking down at him, “I think it went well. All that practicing paid off, hm?”

“I think the kissing was overkill.” He makes a face, and Wooyoung shakes his head, eyebrows raised and showing off creases in his forehead.

“Hey, can’t be too safe.” San sees his eyes go past his shoulder, and he’s looking back at him, as if asking him something. “ Your mom is literally staring at us through the window.”

“Oh, my god. Ignore her, please. She’s so embarrassing.”

“No, she’s cool. Makes excellent cake.” Wooyoung nods, adjusts his weight on his back leg and setting a hand in his back pocket, feeling the July breezes cool over his golden chains and it’s then when he remembers that he probably wouldn’t have to see San again.

San smiles, and Wooyoung’s kind of glad that he looks down to the sidewalk rather than back at his face so that he didn’t see his disappointment.

“I’ll see you, Sunny. Don’t be a stranger, okay? Yeosang’ll kill you.” Wooyoung smiles softly at him, before taking the steps to walk back to his house, but San pulls back on his hand, the one clutching the now empty reusable grocery bag.

“Wait, Woo…”

Wooyoung waits, but he doesn’t know for what. Maybe he waited for the two grateful kisses San pressed on his lips, stood on his tippy toes and held onto the fabric of his silky shirt for. Maybe he waited for the thanks he gave again, thanks for being his pretend boyfriend for a week just for today. Maybe it was for the appreciative smile that Wooyoung saw only when San was around his friends, the one that would make his eyes squint up and his dimples crease his cheeks and his teeth to show, that he would give anything to know that he was the cause of once again.

He doesn’t know.

What he _does_ know, is that Choi San really was going to be the death of him. If not soon, then definitely later.

He’ll wait.


	14. mom!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i'm rlly out here finishing this au in my docs rather than packing but anyways
> 
> this should have been attached to the previous chapter but i made it into a new one so i dont feel bad about my lack of productivity yeehaw
> 
> i've written down the beginnings of the merman au, idk if i should make it seongi or seongsang so if you guys have a preference pls lmk! yall already know i'm absolute garbage at decisions smhhh thank u jane and tracy for giving me the confidence to go on and make it <33 i'll stick to it after this one!
> 
> or maybe after me and char’s soulmate au hehe c': 
> 
> enjoy!

“San, Wooyoung is a very sweet boy. How about inviting him over for dinner again?”

San’s heart pounds like punches to his chest upon hearing that absolutely dreaded question.

_Fuck, fuck._

He thinks of something to say, goes back to the scenarios he'd thought of if his mom ever walked in on him doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. He gets rid of it though, somehow doesn’t think it would have the same effect.

Hm.

“Um, I think he’s busy that day,” San says, gripping the slippery plate he was drying off a little too hard, hearing the squeaks of friction beneath his fingertips.

“I didn’t even say what day.” His mom gives him a look, handing him another plate after he sets the dry one away in the cabinet.

San swallows, acts like he’s spent his entire life’s work for this very moment of drying this fine china in his hands rather than think about inviting Wooyoung over for dinner, staring at it meticulously. It didn’t help that he was a terrible liar, so terrible that the truth would end up coming out and too much more, would probably bring up a story that happened with Mingi and Yeosang that involved them _actually_ doing something illegal.

He sighs.

“Well, what...what day?” San asks, becoming more embarrassed by the second as he thinks of Wooyoung coming over for dinner _again,_ has a rosy rush on his cheeks and he looks down to try and hide it from his mom.

“How’s about...next Sunday?”

San collects his thoughts in the running water of the faucet, listens to the sounds of the fucked up pipes rattling beneath the sink when she increases the running faucet, as if listening for answers. He looks at his mother, a soft sheen of sweat on her forehead from washing dishes in a hot kitchen, and he’s reminded of when he was a little kid and would actually look forward to washing dishes with his mom.

Simpler times, back then. He didn’t miss it.

San finally shakes his head once, putting the dried plate into the china cabinet, not bothering to pay attention to his appearance in the reflective glass like he’d usually do. “He’s busy.”

“San, you can’t hide your relationship forever. We’re having dinner again next Sunday. I had no idea that he was Yeosang’s brother. You need to keep me integrated with your friends!” San’s mother hands him another wet plate.

San gets embarrassed again, feels the humiliation rising like heat on his back, raking its fingers through his hair and pressing its hands onto his cheeks the more he thinks about stuff like that.

_“Mom.”_

“Tell Wooyoung that we’re having dinner next Sunday again, see if he’s really busy. Put him on the phone for me. No buts!”

“But-”

_“San.”_

San sighs for what seems like the millionth time in the span of ten minutes, but doesn’t protest further, and pulls out his phone from his back pocket, dialing Wooyoung’s number from his recents and putting it on speaker, ignoring the wet streak he left across the screen from his fingers. His mom raises her eyebrows at him, and he shakes his head, giving her a look that said _mom, please don’t make me call Wooyoung again and invite him for dinner so that I have to pretend to date him for another period of time._

But he never says anything out loud, and ends up hearing Wooyoung’s voice echo through the otherwise empty kitchen, save for the running faucet.

“Hi, baby. Everything okay?”

San nearly is sick on the floor when he hears that. Right in front of his _friggin_ mom.

“Hi, Wooyoung, it’s his mother. I know you just left the house but, how would you like coming over for dinner again in about two weeks? Sunday?”

San is really hoping his telepathic screaming is reaching Wooyoung in his house next door, biting the inside of his bottom lip and it’s pinching the anxiety out of him. His phone feels almost too heavy in his matchstick hand and he’s staring at the red end call button, tempting.

Very, very tempting.

“Of course I would, ma’am! Dinner was excellent by the way, the cake was the best part. It’d be nice to have your cooking again soon. Any specific time?”

San’s mom is looking at him the entire time she speaks with a look of perseverance and San wants to die, right there in the middle of his kitchen.

“Five thirty again?”

“Sounds good.” Wooyoung gives a tiny giggle at the end of his sentence, really playing it up like San prodded him many, _many_ times before this, and San told himself that he would kill him as soon as he saw him again for not declining. “I’ll see you soon, ma’am. Have a nice ni-”

San hangs up the phone, Wooyoung’s voice quickly leaving through the other ear and he almost forgets what the conversation was about to begin with. He puts the phone back in his pocket and suddenly has a headache, blames it on the fact that he has to continue fake dating Wooyoung for another _two fucking weeks_ (but it was probably the fumes from that smelly lemon-citrus-Hawaiin-luau-dream dish soap, San wasn’t thinking about it).

“I need to throw up.” He says, and his mom makes a face at him, handing him the last plate without looking at it.

“San, you’re so weird. Come help me clean the rest of the kitchen. And go to sleep early, you still have school.”

 _School_. More chances for Wooyoung to show up with a brown paper bag filled with (really tasty, to San’s pleasant surprise) sandwiches and softy handwritten notes. San groans again.


	15. oh, man, you cut me to size (ow!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello i'm back!! 
> 
> before u read i just want to say
> 
> i really hope this doesn't come off as conceited or cocky or annoying, anything at all like that, but to all of the people who have dmed me/commented such nice things about this fic, left me cc's just talking to me about it, etc. I HOPE U KNOW HOW MUCH THAT MEANS TO ME!! with every message, imagine me with the absolute dumbest smile on my face while blushing like an IDIOT because of all the kind things you say about it. and ur probably like "mandi it's just an au shut up ffs" but! meeting really sweet people that encourage me to be nicer to others, keep writing, being a better person in general, etc. has made this fic that my stupid ass 17 year old self spends 3am writing rather than going to bed worth it! fae, char, julia, jane, lisa, and to the people reading this note right now that i hope to know the names of soon! - YOU GUYS MEAN THE WORLD TO ME THANK U FOR EXISTING ILY ILY ILY <3333 
> 
> enjoy hehe
> 
> p.s. this scene kinda contains a teensy more uhh,,, kissing than what i'm used to but it's for plot purposes i swear! i will literally never write smut for u guys eVER it would be complete garbage lmao
> 
> p.p.s. THANK U LISA FOR BETA READING THIS LORD KNOWS I NEEDED IT I LOVE U <3

It’s been a few days.

San found it easier to be around Wooyoung. The more time he spent with him, the more he caught himself craving the next time he’d be able to see him, as if he was a new addiction that San couldn’t wait to mix with his blood or rub into his skin or breathe into his lungs. He seemed to just want _Wooyoung,_ and he thinks it’s gross how he would literally stop time when he’s calling on the phone just to see how he’s doing because he’s been too busy to visit, or waiting in the big oak tree in between their houses to think with him.

He always hated the feeling of his stomach dropping or heart skipping beats. He never rode rollercoasters, never tried bungee jumping and wouldn’t _ever_ try skydiving for that matter. He hated it with a passion.

But when it came to Wooyoung, maybe he didn’t mind so much.

He almost never minded anything with him. Never minded the unsolicited smiles Wooyoung would pull from him, knowing how much he didn’t like his smile, yet, he felt good doing it. Never minded the long talks or pleasant quiets. Never minded the late-night calls that interrupted his Undertale game or listening to the soft snores that replaced sleepy conversations on the other line.

None of that.

So, of course, he was okay now. He was lying on Wooyoung’s bed, whose feet were kicked out of the window while the sun was bathing them in lemon light again. Warmth, like arctic sun, both on his skin and in his chest. They weren’t talking at all - they were in silence, yet, San seemed to hear everything Wooyoung wasn’t saying. The only form of communication that San had from him for the time passed was the lazy strokes of his fingers skating on San’s shoulder, maybe the occasional kiss to his hair, whatever.

Wooyoung shifts slowly, shuffles in the blankets, and San moves with him, feeling himself stir a bit more, and that dragging, drowsy feeling was gone.

“The sunlight’s making me tired.”

His words were silver needles. Piercing, but not too bad to where San‘s train derailed from his tracks.

He got over it.

“Me, too.” He says simply, adjusting his head on Wooyoung’s shoulder a bit, feeling it press against the back of his ear, but not caring too much to move, that same exhaustion coming back to him like the common cold, as if it never really went away.

“Still the same, I see.” Wooyoung says, seemingly more to himself, but he hears it anyway, and San feels the soft jump of his chest as he breathed out a chuckle.

“What do you mean?” He asks, smells the soft remnants of Wooyoung’s cologne and strawberry-coconut shampoo, shutting his heavy eyes as he hides his face in the crook of Wooyoung’s neck and focuses on the warmth of the sun on his cold, leaflet skin.

“When we were younger. Remember? You and Yeosang and I would always lay down in the sun during winter, and you would fall asleep and leave me and Sang by ourselves. That’s when you began to hang out with Mingi, too.”

San smiles, could practically see the picture in the midnight black of his eyelids, and he feels of feathers when he remembers. He does, very vividly, because he had always loved the way sunlight felt on cold skin, ever since his first winter here.

He nods.

“You haven’t changed too much.” Wooyoung continues, looking up at the white ceiling rather than out of the window for a change of pace. “Lots of the same stuff. Like how you smile at things that other people would normally not even bat an eyelash at. Like, when we went to the beach that one time. You almost drowned yourself in trying to get some sand dollars.”

It was then when San stops.

He feels something bubbling in him the more Wooyoung spoke about him. He doesn’t really know what, or why, but he gets kind of annoyed. Maybe it was the fact that, every time Wooyoung brought something up from years ago, he remembers how he felt about him back then, versus how he feels about him now. Maybe it was because he didn’t know when the last time he would be friends with Wooyoung was going to be, that he would be talking to him one last time before he went off to college and left the two of them by themselves. Yeosang, not so much, because Wooyoung visited often and saw him nearly every day. Maybe San had been mad at him because he wanted so much to stay with Wooyoung, only to have him leave.

He doesn’t know. He can’t pinpoint it and he didn’t try to, either. He didn’t _think_.

“How are you bringing up the past like you still know me? Just because we were friends when we were kids doesn’t mean you _know_ me _._ You don’t.” San leans up on one elbow, looking into the amber pools and golden leaves, expecting a reaction, yet feeling somewhat shamed because it was really hard not to when staring into something so pretty and honest and unknowing.

He felt like an asshole for saying it. His plan to stay stonehenge from the start was crumbling right before him and he was mad, mad that he couldn’t help but feel like an _asshole_ under Wooyoung’s gaze.

“Well, then help me,” Wooyoung says softly, unmoved at San’s tone, pressing a hand on his cheek and letting his thumb run over the soft skin under his eye, looking up at him with something in his face but he really can’t tell what it was - _studying_ him, as if he was something in a museum and Wooyoung had to keep coming back to his favorite exhibit. “Help me know you again. I want to.”

San’s heart jumps and he sighs through his nose, as if he was exhausted, pressing his forehead against Wooyoung’s and feeling everything pool back into him again and he feels sick against the all too bright sunlight.

“You make everything so hard, did you know that?” His voice sounds of tissue paper, thin rips and easily crinkled by Wooyoung’s hands.

He’s silent for a moment, the first time that San’s left him with no quick comebacks or blank words to say. San feels his hand stop on his cheek, and instead trails to his chin to make him look up at him.

“What does that mean for you?”

Wooyoung asks in such a way that makes San want to open up, break up his half-painted walls and soon, his butterfly heart’s set free.

“Pretend dating you is so tiring sometimes.”

He quickly falls sheepish, harping over his words and how they must have sounded coming out of his mouth. San never liked doing stuff like this. Never liked talking about his feelings, never liked showing affection, never liked showing people what was under his skin and inside of his bones. He hated it, really. So for Wooyoung to be so effortlessly leading him on a path of beautiful flowers and chirping birds of warm hugs and kisses, into foliage and lush gardens of his own heart that he could step on and hear them shatter beneath him, and in return, feel nothing but love and glow of gentle touches, was nearly too much. Sincerely overwhelming. And even worse when he has to let go of his hand and go back to his conflicting place of thorns in makeshift rosebushes because he remembers that this was just for show.

Just for another week.

“Kiss me.” Wooyoung breaks his silence, breaks the bloody war between San’s head and his heart, and takes his hand once more. He’s gently running his fingers through the fringe of San’s hair, and he’s surfing on cotton candy clouds again.

“Why?”

_“Please.”_

San does.

This one was so, so different. San and Wooyoung were running now, running carelessly with the winds blowing through their clothes and hair. The forest didn’t seem to have an ending point with this one. San feels his entire body set spur, like firecrackers made up his cells and he had the eruptions of Mauna Loa in his chest. He kisses him again, Wooyoung tightening the grip he had on San’s waist, and he should be used to it, but recently, kissing Wooyoung was something of the devil’s lore and he felt very strange, quickly becoming attached to the graze of soft, wanting lips on his own, as if he was the eighth deadly sin.

Seems like Wooyoung really was bad for his health.

The way Wooyoung’s lips move against his mouth with this one reminded San of warm down comforters. Inviting, feather-like presses and nothing but warmed alleviation, so much so that San couldn’t help but focus everything into Wooyoung.

He didn’t even hear Yeosang calling for him, didn’t even hear the intrusion of the door opening and exposing their bubble, popping it with the simplicity of turning the doorknob.

“Holy _shit_.”

San sets off, as if an emergency alarm was ringing in his head. It was horribly loud, made San’s heart kick against his throat and face take on the color of crimson lipstick. He scrambles off of Wooyoung, out of breath and wide-eyed, hearing nothing, yet hearing Yeosang practically screaming at him, _knowing_ that he would never hear the end of this.

_Fuck._

He stares at the ceiling, wondering what happened to him because two weeks ago San would literally never even set foot near Wooyoung, heating up as if he was lying in a bed of hot coals rather than soft grey comforters. He hopes that by not moving, Yeosang wouldn’t see him, that maybe he’d blend in with the sunlight or something, and he wouldn’t have to suffer through Yeosang bringing this up again, and again, humiliation seeping into his head and pounding against his temples like a fever.

“What do you want, Sang?” Wooyoung answers, knows San well enough that he wouldn’t be hearing San speak again probably until tomorrow.

Yeosang has his hand on the knob, telling him that he wouldn’t be here long, yet it felt like he’d been standing there for an eternity. San doesn’t even have to look at him to know exactly what was on his face.

“I was gonna ask San if he wanted to hang out with us while you go to that frat party you were supposed to be at…” he checks his invisible watch on his bare wrist and looks back at Wooyoung, “twenty-five minutes ago, but I see you’re both very busy. They’re already outside, but I’ll just tell them-”

“ _No!_ No, I’m...I’m not busy, I’ll g-go with you guys. It’s fine. It’s fine.” San gets up almost too quickly, feels the pressure against his temples and nearly slides out of Wooyoung’s door without saying goodbye, lugging his embarrassment out with him.

Yeosang gives his brother a look before closing the door, following San downstairs to meet their friends in Hongjoong’s van.

“Hm.” He says, and San almost immediately responds with a _hm,_ a form of short, yet effective communication between the two. With them being best friends for as long as either of them can remember, he understood exactly what he meant in that simple _hm._

San doesn’t say much else about it after that, not even when Mingi follows through with his regularly scheduled teasing upon seeing how red San’s face was, not even when Hongjoong begins to laugh at him, and not even when Yeosang gives him a knowing look through the rearview mirror.


	16. for seonghwa!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys i'm back! 
> 
> sorry for the late update!! i originally wanted to update when i was finished with the entire au but! i figured since we're a l m o s t done with it to just update it! hopefully the rest of the au doesn't disappoint you guys! thank you for sticking with me even though i update every other eclipse i appreciate u
> 
> this one is for the loml julie thank u for being amazing i love u! 
> 
> also for those asking for more yeosan, here u go!! this chapter contains a litttleeee more crackheadity feel free to skip the gc convos if you'd rather do that!
> 
> enjoy please!
> 
> p.s. before i wrote this i was still fairly new to ateez and when i was looking up birthdays i saw san's was nov 7? n i was like wow hongjoong's bday is nov 7 too very cool!! then i looked at the profile again,, TURNS OUT I WAS JUST LOOKING AT HONGJOONG'S AND SAN'S BDAY IS IN FACT JULY 10 i am a fool so this fic takes place in july nOT november but they still have school bc uhhh idk dual enrollent but i fixed it i hope u celebrated w san yesterday uwu

 

> **gigi** added **8375827482** to the conversation.

**gigi:** _hello_

 **gigi:** _can someone pls take my niece_

 **gigi:** _i have uhhh_

 **gigi:** _i have plans_

 **gigi:** _w yunho_

 **8375827482:** _hello im yunho_

 **jongho:** _YUNHO HELLO_

 **yunho:** _JONGHO WHAT—_

 **joong:** _THE yunho_

 **joong:** _as in my babie yunho_

 **hwa:** _As in OUR babie yunho_

 **jongho:** _imagine having a brother who steals all ur spotlight_

 **yeo:** _IMAGINE_

 **yeo:** _YUNHO HELLO SWEETHEART <333 _

**yunho:** _omg :((( hi yeo <333 i lov u _

**_YUNHO <333 HELLO_ **

**yunho:** _HI SANNIE!!_

 **gigi:** _how come yall dont put this same energy in looking at ur schedules to see if u could TAKE MY NIECE_

 **yeo:** _i would but i cant im gonna go fuck my bitch upside down on his moms bed_

 **hwa:** _Can’t Gi I’m going on a picnic date w Sang today at the botanical gardens_

 **hwa:** _OMG YEO—_

 **gigi:** _ISNDISNDIXN_

 **yunho:** _HWAAAA_

 **hwa:** _YUNHOOO <333 _

**joong:** _i could but like_

 **joong:** _dont want to :/_

 **yeo:** _i asked wooyoung and he said sure but san has to come too bc he hates children_

 **gigi:** _MY NIECE IS LIKE NINE MONTHS OLD SHE CANT SPEAK_

 **gigi:** _yall triflin fr_

 **gigi:** _sannie pls help and go w woo_

 **gigi:** _nanies are expensive and im a lowly high school student_

 **joong:** _gi where are ur parents??_

 **gigi:** _on a fuckin date_

 **gigi:** _like??? yall gotta finish raising mE aint no time for dates!!!!_

 **hwa:** _Awe omg_

**_sure_ **

**_kids are cool_ **

**_wait omg a date??? that’s so cute :c_ **

**yeo:** _gi ur parents are so cute fuck off_

 **gigi:** _i mean i guess_

 **gigi:** _san ur the only real one here_

 **gigi:** _everyone else gO HOME!!!_

 **hwa:** _Gigi we love you and your baby niece_

 **yeo:** _what hwa said!!_

 **joong:** _yeosang u hate kids_

 **yeo:** _and what about it_

 **joong:** _n e ways guys look_

 **joong:** _[view image]_

 **joong:** _hurt like a bitch,,, probably gonna get infected but u only live once!!!_

 **hwa:** _OMG KIM HONGJOONG_

 **jongho:** _HEBDIAJDIDJSKNDFIDJ_

 **yunho:** _o-oh wow_

 **yunho:** _hongjoong PRETTY pretty huh_

 **gigi:** _ISHDISJDIDJSIDNDNND_

**_OH WORM_ **

**_U WENT AND DID THAT_ **

**_HE DID THAT_ **

**_JOONG DID_ **

**_THAT_ **

**yeo:** _ON GOD??? THIS IS WHY U CANT TAKE CARE OF MINGIS NIECE BC U BUSY PUTTING HOLES IN UR FACE_

 **yeo:** _a fake bitch if i’ve ever seen one !_

 **joong:** _shut UP_

 **hwa:** _It actually looks really good on you?? Bitch oh my god_

 **jongho:** _joong u rlly popped off with this one!_

 **jongho:** _im jealous_

 **yeo:** _ur nose was built for a septum so!!! what else did we expect???_

 **yeo:** _u look cute ma_

**_send ur new selfies to the gc_ **

**_i wanna see ur pretty face!_ **

**joong:** _san i love u :c_

**_omg :(( i love u :((( more :(((((_ **

**gigi:** _sanjoong gay_

 **yeo:** _right in front of my salad??? SICK_

 **gigi:** _IM DROPPING OFF MY NIECE TO SANS HOUSE WHAT TIME ARE YOU LEAVING ON YOUR DATE SANG_

 **yeo:** _uhhhh idk_

 **yeo:** _hwa said 12_

 **yeo:** _so noon_

 **hwa:** _ill pick u up then petal_

 **yeo:** _okay!_

 **joong:** _ew_

 **gigi:** _thank u san ily_

**_yes ofcofc_ **

**_i love u 2_ **

**yeo:** _oooo san cheatin_

 **gigi:** _i wonder what woo would have to say ab this_

 **gigi:** _never thought EYE would be the one to steal his bitch but!_

 **jongho:** _wait wait woo and san are dating_

 **jongho:** _and yunho didnt even tell me anything smh_

 **jongho:** _fake bitch doesnt want me to know the tea i guess :/_

 **yunho:** _u act like i actually know what’s going on w wooyoung half the time_

 **yunho:** _one day he wont even scoff at sans name and the next he wont shush ab him_

 **joong:** _jongho theyre fake dating_

 **gigi:** _*real dating_

 **yeo:** _**really real dating_

 **yeo:** _either that or the complete makeout session i walked in on yesterday was a very convincing act_

 **gigi:** _MAKEOUTNDJSBDKWNDJ_

 **joong:** _IDNDISJDIND_

 **yunho:** _HUH_

 **jongho:** _on god yeosang a snitch im cRYING_

 **yeo:** _SJJDDJJD I SAID WHAT I SAID_

 **gigi:** _THEY WERE MAKING OUT?????_

 **gigi:** _I NEVER THOUGHT CHOI SAN—_

 **yunho:** _THEY WERE WHAT_

 **gigi:** _DIDNT WE SAY NO FIRST KISS TILL AFTER MARRIAGE????_

 **yeo:** _RIGHT??? im boutta ground his mf ass mySELF I sTG_

 **joong:** _IM SCREAMING THIS IS Y HE CANT STAND YALL_

 **yeo:** _could yall believe wooyoung came into my room the other day just to talk ab the dinner_

 **yeo:** _i’m like???_

 **yeo:** _what if i was doing drugs or sumn??? downloading pirated movies??? he literally BURSTS into my room on some “yeosang the dinner went really good san’s mom is so sweet and she invited me over for dinner again whats that mean!!!1!1!!”_

 **hwa:** _OMG AWE_

 **hwa:** _I’m gonna cry that’s so cute wtf_

 **joong:** _omg remember when wooyoung literally couldnt stand san_

 **joong:** _and now he sounds like he rlly wants this to work out for him :(((_

 **jongho:** _yes we love character development!!_

 **gigi:** _that shit right there?? that’s called love dawg :(((_

 **jongho:** _wooyoung gay_

 **joong:** _san gay_

 **jongho:** _woosan gay_

 **hwa:** AND I OOP

 **hwa:** _rip san’s heart once he sees these messages 0.0_

**_YEOSANGNSJ_ **

**_DID U REALLY HAVE TO TELL THE WHOLE ASS GC_ **

**_I CANT BELIEVE U_ **

**_I FRIKING HATE U_ **

**_IHYIHYIHY_ **

**_JFDNJSNDJFIDID_ **

**_IM GONNA_ **

**_I_ **

**_IM FADING_ **

**_I CANNOT BLEIEV_ **

**_YEOSNANG_ **

**_EIXJSINIFIRIDJ_ **

**_IM SO EVARRASSD_ **

**_DTJIS_ **

**_SI SO MF EMABRRSDING_ **

**hwa:** _see_

…

It's really dark outside, the only light coming from San's television as he engages in yet another battle with Metatron that he was most likely going to lose  _again._ He'd lost track of time, only counting the number of times he'd quit the game, reopen it to fight again, quit the game, then reopen it. And in the period he's spending with sweaty palms and the burning fire of prolonged irritation in the pit of his chest, he only notices then that his phone lights up, the brightness way too much for his eyes, and he has to squint before he picks it up.

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

 **yeo:** _hey_

**_whaaaat_ **

**yeo:** _i miss u_

**_…sang really??_ **

**yeo:** _yes :(_

**_it’s 1:44 in the morning_ **

**yeo:** _:((((((((_

**_okok_ **

**_i’m coming_ **

**_pullin up to ur crib rn_ **

...

“Sannie!”

San took it upon himself to open Yeosang’s window, he didn’t see the kid in there but he knew he never locked his window (only in case of hurricanes, but they rarely occurred here), and when he came back, he nearly dropped his juice box. Yeosang sets it on the floor haphazardly, excited, gleaming eyes locked on his best friend closing the window, and San can’t help but giggle in appreciation when Yeosang practically runs into his arms, laughs escaping his mouth.

“I missed you, San! Thank god you came!”

“ _Yeosang_! You have to be quiet, everyone is sleeping!” San lowers his voice to a harsh whisper and hugs Yeosang back tightly, because in the amount of time he hasn’t seen him, it feels like he’s holding love and warmth in the form of cotton candy clouds and glittering dew drops in the morning in his arms rather than his best friend clad in an old sweater.

“Oh!” Yeosang lowers his voice to a harsh whisper, and then looks behind his shoulder, as if his mother had opened the door and was about to scold them for being too loud, with the big, pink rollers in her hair and everything. 

“I missed you, San!”

San smiles, and in that moment of hearing the high pitches of his voice, he feels everything rush back to him, feels everything and anything of why he loves Yeosang come to him, and suddenly, he’s deprived. He hadn’t had time to be with Yeosang alone recently - it’s always been with their friends or he’s with Wooyoung.

“I missed you, too.” He lets it slip, the bare bones of his waterfall words reaching Yeosang and he feels his shoulders move with his giggles in his arms at that, because he knows how San is with stuff like this.

“Awe, come on, best friend. We saw each other yesterday!” Yeosang pulls back and shoots San a smile, his voice just the same as before — pretty loud, enough for someone to hear them if they passed by — and he lightly pinches one of San’s cheeks in between his pointer finger and thumb. “I’m supposed to be the clingy one, stop cramping my style.”

Yeosang jokes about it, but San can see it in the way his eyes glint against the moonlight filling in the bedroom like soap water, that he knows, too. The two were very good at completing each other, the moon on San’s tongue and the stars in his chest, the sun in Yeosang’s eyes and cloud iridescence in the way he grins.

“Shush. Where’s your mom?” San asks, going back to properly shutting the window when Yeosang goes back over to his juice box, which is already developing a condensation sheen inside from being abandoned in his slightly warmer bedroom for a few minutes.

“Sleeping.” He shrugs, plops himself down on the beanbag chair in front of his television so that San could sit away from the dust bunnies, holding his apple juice with two hands as if it weighed too much as he diverts his attention into the invasive glow of the television.

“And Wooyoung?” San lies down on Yeosang’s bed, kicking off his shoes and looking at the mint green glow stars on Yeosang’s mint green ceiling, seeing how dim they were in the moonlight’s laughter pouring in through the glitter curtains, and he feels light, like he was lying on the clouds again.

“Out with Yunho and his college friends. Not coming back ‘till like…3am or something.” Yeosang shrugs, watching the last of the cartoon he’s left on before the commercial cut.

San nods, and Yeosang sips from his apple juice box as there’s no sound in the room, save for an ad about saltine crackers running. San looks at him, and he’s staring absentmindedly at the tiles of his floor instead of the television, lightly nipping at the end of his juice box straw. His eyes seem lost, and San can tell his mind was running somewhere at its fastest speed, that he let it jump out of the window and he hadn’t bothered to chase after it.

“You’re thinking. Talk to me.” San says, turning his body to face Yeosang, his face pressed into the mattress and he smells the remnants of his strawberry-lemon shampoo.

Yeosang raises his eyebrows in slight disturbance, San voice like a pin drop in the bustling silence of his head. He puts his juice box down, sighs, and looks at the floor again for answers, for a starter in his sentences.

“When I...say the word _love,_ what do you think of?” Yeosang asks, earning a look from San, and he smiles in return because yes, it was a weird question to ask his best friend who blushes and keeps quiet when his friends talk about something remotely out of their age group, or can’t stand to speak about anything that starts with the letter “W”.

But he waits for an answer anyway.

“Hm.” San studies the pretty white tiles in Yeosang’s room as he thinks into the many possibilities that could become of this answer, until settling on one mediocre, yet very special drink that he finds the utmost happiness in. “Yogurt smoothies.”

“Okay,” Yeosang nods with a tiny grin, glancing to the glow stars, “so when I say the words _in love,_ what do you think of?”

San looks to the tile floor again, ignores the quick shots of pretty-shaped eyes and bright smiles that remind him of crystal halos on a silver sky day, and really thinks. 

In love, huh?

“I think of…hm. I think of the world.” San sees the beauty of park reservations and all of the nice pictures he spends time looking at on the internet sometimes into the slightly dusty tile of Yeosang’s room, like a screen to a projector.

“I really like the stars and the universe and the flowers and the waterfalls. Earth’s creations, I guess.” He flicks his eyes back to Yeosang, face shadowed in the moonlight, yet San could see what he’s thinking.

Almost.

“Elaborate more. I wanna hear it.”

“Well…alright,” San says, and then he rolls over again so that he’s lying on his back to look at the glow stars on Yeosang’s ceiling, finding his thoughts in the dull, sickly green of the stickers. “I’m in love with how Earth just chooses to do weird things. Like, it’s on a cycle. A cycle to adjust itself and create solar eclipses and blood moons, a cycle to make flowers grow, a cycle to rain and thunder and then align itself with the sun so that we’re warm for a few hours. Speaking of flowers, I guess I could be in love with them, too. They’re always so pretty, one is never like the rest, but every single one is beautiful.” San perks, turning his head to Yeosang. 

“Remember when you used to pick flowers with me in your mom’s garden just to give me them after we got scolded, just so I could feel better? I really loved that you gave them to me. I don’t know why, but it’s like…I don’t know.” San shrugs and shakes his head, slightly finding the fact that he’s never really been in love sort of lame, but he ignores it. “Being in love is a weird feeling, but I’d assume being in love with the Earth would be the same as being in love with a person.” San pulls himself back, plants his feet back on the ground and waves goodbye to his imagination, just for a little while more. “Why do you ask?”

Yeosang is quiet for a minute, and he’s lightly rocking a sock-covered foot to the right, then to the left, studying how it moves, and San’s waiting with him to find something to say. Yeosang looks like all that’s going through his head is western winds of the Sahara, maybe a tumbleweed or two of stray conscious. He looks troubled, and he wonders if there’s anything wrong with him. 

San really hopes there isn’t.

After a short while of Yeosang blinking his thoughts into words, he finally speaks, and his voice comes out scared and uncertain, like the San Andreas faults.

“I think I’m in love with Seonghwa.”

San warms of fireflies, and feels his own heart beating in a mixture of different states of happiness, sort of like the ones that he’d gotten the day of the dinner. He quickly sits up on his butt, giving Yeosang a grin.

“You’re in love with Hwa? Tell him!”

“But what if he doesn’t feel the same?”  Yeosang asks, and San hears the heavy fear that his voice is lugging along in the carriage of his words, and he tilts his head, but there’s not a smile on his face like there usually is when he moves his head like that.

“Yeo, I’m almost a thousand percent sure he feels the same. He calls you _petal,_ bro. Are you kidding? Tell him! The day Hwa stops loving you is the day the sun stops shining on us. And the sun’s pretty fuckin’ old,” San shrugs, and Yeosang smiles, but San doesn’t get to see it because he hides it in his hands, lets his smile pool into his palms and his blush bleed into his fingers.

“ _San!”_

“It’s true! You have nothing to worry about!” San giggles, and Yeosang doesn’t look up from his hands, thinking about the possibilities of actually telling him. 

Would he be happy? Yeosang wants to find out, but at the same time, he’d be way too terrified to even begin to think about it.

And while Yeosang’s thinking, something stirs inside San, like how it feels to watch the sunrise at dawn on the roof, and he suddenly feels like he could do anything. The world was in his hands, and the universe was at his fingertips. Something about this short conversation the two had made him want to speak and never shut up, a feeling of little fireworks popping off in his tummy. He wants to do something. He doesn’t know what, or where, but he just wants to _go._

“Hey, Yeosang. Let’s go to the beach.”

Yeosang shoots his head up from where he was hiding it in his hands, face shadowed by the moon, but San sees the features of skepticism that he’s grown familiar with from Yeo.

“What?”

“Beach!” San shouts, eager for whatever reason (Yeosang blames it on the high tides that the moon was bringing in sided with the crystals he has in his dresser drawer, but he’d never tell San).

“San, sweetie, it’s nearly two am.” Yeosang gave him a look, voice wavering, and San took it as the signs of a ticking time bomb of convincing Yeosang to go do something with him for him to actually go and do it.

“What, you have a curfew?” San asks incredulously, knowing damn well that they _both_ did, a strict one at that, but he didn’t care about it, not now. “You up to watch the sunrise?”

Yeosang stares at him, his expressions bleeding together a mix of confusion and disbelief.

“I cannot believe-” 

“Come on, please? We could just sneak out. Get yogurt smoothies and watch the sunrise! Yeo _sang!”_

Yeosang smiles again, the one of corona ponds that Seonghwa’s always talking about, or when San surprises him in his bedroom with leftover cookies his mom made for him after a really bad day. He really wouldn’t have suspected these things to be coming out of San’s mouth. 

Choi San — conservative and shy and always looking to take the safer and less risky routes Choi San — was planning to jailbreak out of the house and adventure to the beach until dawn.

Hm.

“San, we’re gonna get caught,” Yeosang says, and lowers his voice to a whisper, as if his mom was outside the door again.

“It's gonna be fine! Let’s try living for once!” San whispers back, has a mischievous smile on his face with his fingers gripping at the mattress in earnest.

Yeosang stares at him, and then finally sighs, looking at his glow stars in slight exasperation.

“Grab my keys, please. I’m gonna get my wallet and we could use the tree to leave. I swear, if we get caught, I’m literally gonna kill you.” Yeosang gets up from the beanbag chair (with much effort, that juice was a little too much for his stomach), and goes towards his bed while San gets up and grabs Yeosang’s silver keys off of the polished wooden hook rack by his doorframe, gleaming like gems in the moon’s shine.

“Come on, Yeo!” San whispers harshly, opens the window quickly again and throws one leg out, foot prodding against the ridged oak tree until he found a good spot to step.

It doesn’t take long for San to reach the ground, the tree nearly his third home, and he waits impatiently for Yeosang to spider crawl his way down in fear of getting yet _another_ injury from this tree. It was then when he feels the hauntings of getting caught slip right on his back, and his heart is flipping off of the kickboards of the magnitude of trouble they would get in if it did happen. It was in the dead of the early morning, the blush hours in which San would usually find himself playing Undertale, but instead, he was outside in the chilly air, drumming his fingers on his jogger bottoms as he waits for Yeosang to get down.

San unlocks the car parked across the street once he sees the tips of Yeosang’s shoes touch the grass beneath them, and the two nearly run to it, hurrying inside and shutting the doors, San’s giggles colliding with the engine startup.

“That was _so_ loud. What if it woke my mom?” Yeosang asks, backing out of the driveway quickly.

“Don’t crash! Use the mirrors,” San says, peeking into his side mirror to see the shadowed garbage can sitting where it usually is for the takeout truck, and the old, forgotten basketball hoop behind the curb where it usually is for Yeosang to chuck a deflated ball at it and further splinter the glass backboard whenever he was bored.

He was fine.

San realizes the radio’s playing softly — a familiar pop song that he’s grown terribly sick of rather quickly — as he looks out the window, and the two pass his own house, and the neighbors’ yards and the playground left past the stop sign. 

He can’t help but feel of candle flame again; he’s never done something like this before, and it was Saturday morning and he still had homework to do for class on Monday, but he pushed that thought in the back of his head. The worries of the dinner in a week, the stress of being _him,_ had been suppressed and avoided thinking of at all costs.

Just for now.

“How was Mingi’s niece?” Yeosang asks, as they drive down a black road of desolate houses and an elementary school, when the shock of sneaking out of his house without asking his mom settled and he wasn’t freaking out too bad with the shakes of the steering wheel.

“Really good, actually. She didn’t cry once. Wooyoung spent most of the time talking to her as if she could understand what he was saying. It was cute.” San says, watching the lamp posts pass them by and, this time, the glow wasn’t too invasive and he felt wrapped in glass rather than suffocating plastic of being with his mom.

He smiles when he remembers earlier today, thinks of Wooyoung and all of his “ _hi baby girl!”_ s and how cute she was in her onesie pajamas, and even better was Mingi’s grateful smile of the two handing him back a sleeping baby.

“Crazy how he could hate kids but show the most love. Chaotic.” Yeosang turns down an all too familiar street, San’s eyes glinting against the neon 24-hour signs and pearly white shine of interior lights in the old shops of the strip mall.

His favorite pizzeria, favorite 99 cent store, his favorite smoothie shop, all found in exactly one place and he doesn’t think he could get any better than that. Yeosang pulls into the eerily empty drive-thru and asks the lethargic intercom for two drinks and meal baskets for them, San’s mood lifts even higher. Something was weird with how it felt so bright and warm to him, yet the moon was out and watching them.

“Do you like my brother?” Yeosang asks, once he’s paid and was waiting for everything at the second window, just to make small conversation, and San looks at the gear shift, thinking.

Yeosang gives him a silver needle in the form of a simple question. His brain was yelling at him again — seems like that’s all it did — for the nth time since the dinner, and he makes a face. There goes his chest again, heart thrumming as if he really was falling.

Into what, he doesn’t know. Okay, he _does_ , but hates thinking about it.

“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably, I guess.” San shrugs, and he feels his cheeks warm and his voice sounds like candy apples at that last bit, giving away the fact that he _absolutely did_ but just didn’t want to further talk about it.

That goddam Jung Wooyoung.

Yeosang smiles at that, and hands San his smoothie, who immediately pulls off the bit of paper left over the top and begins to drink it, occupying himself instead of having to think, and hopefully not answer more questions about Yeosang’s _stupid_ brother. 

“Are we still gonna go to the beach? The closest one is an hour and a half away, the one we usually go to.” Yeosang’s kind of tired, but he can’t help that same feeling of freedom that’s made a home in his chest, never really doing things like this.

This was the type of thing that wild teenagers do in those unrealistic coming of age movies during the summer. 

Yeosang wasn’t cut out for all of that stuff.

San gives him a look, straw in between cherry blossom lips and eyes of gloss, and Yeosang rolls his own, finally turning the corner onto the main roads.

The ride to the beach had started off quietly, but San took it upon himself to lower the windows while Yeosang was on the highway, and he turned up the radio and stuck his head out of the window, and screamed. And in the hour and a half that San and Yeosang were laughing under the silent awes of the stars, freedom and exuberance in the form of 80 miles per hour as the wind nestles in their hair, San felt alive. 

No, more than that.

He was _living_. He and Yeosang were finally living tonight.

Yeosang parks haphazardly in the little lot that the beach had go offer, behind the trees and the old wooden bridge, and San races to the water, the waves singing impromptu harmonies back at him, holding their hands out for him to take. When Yeosang catches up, with his smoothie half empty and some sand in the back of his shoe and his old sweater slightly falling off of his shoulder,  he finds San crouched by the water, in the borderline of where the wet sand hugs the dry, pressing his hand into the cement sugar and feeling the warm sea wash over his skin while the other holds his nearly empty smoothie. He’s invested into how it feels, how everything feels, and Yeosang can’t help but giggle at him.

“Yeo, isn’t this awesome?” He glances back over his shoulder at him, before going back to the water. “We’re free.” 

“Yeah, it is.” Yeosang sits down a little behind San, his butt lightly sinking in the sand, as he finishes his smoothie and sets their food next to him. He takes his time to watch, to just look at the empty boardwalk, and the empty sand and the empty sea.

He thinks it’s wonderful how that waves are still active and friendly, how the ocean makes sure that the two don’t feel alone and how the salty rush gives them more than just company.

San finally comes back, plops himself down next to Yeosang and falls back into the sand, listening to the ocean singing lullabies to him and seeing the stars open their arms to him. 

This was perfect to him, everything here was a moment of absolute dreams.

“We have about two hours for the sun to rise,” Yeosang says, voice sounding of old parchment as he watches the foam of the soapy waves slap at the shoreline. 

“We could make it,” San replies to him, and Yeosang nods, setting his empty cup next to him and lying with San in the sand. “Hold my hand. If I think that you’re sleeping I’ll squeeze it, and you have to squeeze back if you’re awake, okay?”

Without any second thoughts, Yeosang slips his hand under San’s, pocketing them together and letting his eyes wander to the indigo darks of the sky.

“Your birthday is soon. What are you planning?” 

San thinks, but he doesn’t get very far.

“Not sure. I don’t really wanna do anything big. I was planning to go buy myself a book and see if I could finish it.” San shrugs, and he knows how lame he sounds, but he loved reading, sue him.

“San, that sounds whack. We’re having a party. Just a little one. You’re eighteen now, you can't _not_ celebrate.” Yeosang throws his arm over his tummy and looks at San slightly, but not too much because he didn’t want sand to get in his ear.

“Ugh, Yeosang. I don’t wanna.” San whines, and Yeosang smiles, squeezing his hand.

“Don’t worry about it. We got you.” 

San sighs softly, but he appreciates it. He appreciates Yeosang. He scoots closer to him, feels the grainy sand against his jacket, and he leans his head on Yeosang’s shoulder, moving his body a bit for comfort.

“Don’t fall asleep on me, Sannie.” Yeosang was good at predictions — whenever one of them laid on the other, that was early signs of napping.

He knew San almost as well as he knew himself.

“Might just. This was a mistake.”

Yeosang scoffs, flicking San’s head with his free hand.

“I’ll snitch on you if you do.”

And with that threat, San and Yeosang spent about an hour talking about Seonghwa (and despite Yeosang trying to get Wooyoung in there, San would always change the subject back to Hwa, typically). They ate slowly, the reverbs of sleep and the pressures of drowsiness on their lids and in their shoulders, but it’s only when San spots the first peak of scarlet blush against the sky that he shakes a tired and slightly limp Yeosang.

“Look, Sang! It’s rising!”

Yeosang gasps softly, never seeing a sunrise before, and takes in the hot pinks bleeding into the navy of the nighttime, pays attention to the pokes of the oranges and yellows coming in behind them. He pulls out his phone to take a picture, the time reading 5:49am, and he internally smacks himself because he’s never up this early, not even for school. 

He ignores it.

San does the same, first captures the peaks of the sunrise, and then takes a selfie with Yeosang against the sky. The two are silent for the while after that, and when the birds start calling, San suddenly feels awake. He feels energized with the idea of being free yet again, and the sky leaks yellow, like watercolor syrup on canvas. He seems to be in the painting itself, and he’s reminded of the Earth and the flowers and the waterfalls again. He could never, and would never, get used to the beauties of the world before him. He feels that same thing he did on the highway, and in the way he basks in the sunlight, in the way he has no restrictions on him and in the way he’s sharing everything with his best friend, he suddenly puts a name on it.

Euphoria. The sunrise today was euphoric.

And with that, he quickly picks up his smoothie cup, getting Yeosang’s attention as he stands, the sand falling off of his clothes like rain showers. 

“For Seonghwa!” San shouts, raising his empty smoothie cup and hearing the plastic straw clank against the opening as the sun shines soft, new light on the two, into San’s exhausted eyes and onto Yeosang’s fluffed hair.

Yeosang smiles shyly under San expectant glare, blushing, and he was lucky that the morning red haze of the sunlight was hiding his crimson cheeks. He raises his cup and stands, and it seemed like he was raising more than just a plastic smoothie cup with melted bits of ice in it, but he makes sure to remember today, forever. His voice comes out just as soft as he looked, but he throws an arm around San and shouts, too.

“For Seonghwa!”


	17. bubs and sunny vs sunny...wait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!
> 
> i'm back! yall im so excited we only have a few more chapters left! these next couple of updates are a little weird but they pick up later pls bear w me :( 
> 
> thank u to lisa for beta reading i love u! 
> 
> enjoy please!

**hwa:** _SAN BABY_

 **hwa:** _HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!_

 **gigi:** _HAPPY BIRTHDAY SANNIEEEEE_

 **yunho!:** _HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAN!_

 **yunho!:** _im coming over to smooch ur cheeks u cant say no >:( _

**joong:** _they grow up so fast omg_

 **yeo:** _HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEST FRIEND_

 **yeo:** _THE LOVE OF MY MF LIFE_

 **yeo:** _MY BABY BOY_

 **yeo:** _MY MAIN BITCH_

 **yeo:** _MY MF CINNAMON APPLE_

 **yeo:** _my partner in crime since we’re both grounded for a week :|_

**_aye_ **

**_the way our crackhead energy doubles at night_ **

**_thank u :((((( i love you guys_ **

**_a lot a lot_ **

**_< 3333333_ **

**_omg wait i want smooches from yunho :((_ **

**yunho:** _On my way!_

 **yunho:** _oh_

 **yeo:** welcome to the big boy’s club whatchu gonna do as an 18 year old now

 **gigi:** _finally san turned 18 now we could take him with us to r rated movies_

 **joong:** _u act like we don't take him regardless_

 **jongho:** _HAPPY BIRTHDAY SANNIE HONEY BOY_

**_aHHH THANK U JONGHO ILY c:_ **

**_but enough about me!_ **

**_hongjoong hows ur nose ring_ **

**joong:** _,,,,,_

 **joong:** _so anyways back to san_

 **hwa:** _Did he say,,,, enough about me,,,,, on his birthday,,,,,_

 **hwa:** _San, sweetie—_

 **yunho:** _seems to me like we need to make it extra_

 **yunho** changed the group name to **SANNIE DAY!! <3**

**_aw man_ **

**_now i’m blushing_ **

**_awwww man_ **

**yeo:** _IT’S WHAT U MF DESERVE!!!!_

 **gigi:** _u cant leave ur house right_

 **gigi:** _i say we bring le partay over to sans_

 **yeo:** _mama choi gonna beat some ass if she sees u_

 **gigi:** _she just wont see u dUh_

 **joong:** _i’ll run rounds for my dawg >:(( we fighting mama choi today!! _

**yeo:** _JOONGJDDJDNDID_

 **jongho:** _i’ll have my brother make a pie_

 **yunho:** _i’ll see if jongho wants to make a pie or something_

 **yunho:** _omg_

 **jongho:** _yunho,,,, my dearest brother,,,,_

 **jongho:** _u work at a diner_

 **jongho:** _with a bakery in it_

 **jongho:** _and u make half of the desserts in there_

 **jongho:** _u made the pie wooyoung brought to sans house_

**_YUNHO THAT WAS U????_ **

**_holy shit_ **

**_i ate nearly all of it it was so good_ **

**_what the heck!!! u could bake like that???_ **

**_what cant yunho do_ **

**jongho:** _swim_

 **gigi:** _kiss correctly_

 **joong:** _be short_

 **hwa:** _And I oop_

 **yunho:** _WHAT-_

 **yunho:** _mingi u love my kisses shut uP_

 **yunho:** _THIS IS SANNIE DAY NOT RANK ON YUNHO DAY_

 **yunho:** _fakes!_

**_its ok yunho i love u_ **

**_u deserve the world and thats on periodt_ **

**gigi:** _PERIOD!!!_

 **yeo:** _no tampon_

 **hwa:** _No maxi pad_

 **gigi:** _no menstrual cup_

 **jongho:** _stop pLS_

 **joong:** _fUCKS SAKE_

 **joong:** _can we stay on one (1) topic_

 **gigi:** _im bringing gifts to san’s_

 **joong:** _i have black dye sitting in my closet do u wanna try it_

**_black dye???_ **

**_uhhhh_ **

**_im scared_ **

**_what if i look ugly_ **

**jongho:** _you??? ugly???? LMAO_

 **gigi:** _omg pls never say that again it’s just not realistic truly_

 **joong:** _imagine being san and worrying if ur gonna look ugly_

 **hwa:** _Imagine being San_

 **yeo:** _yeah fr_

 **yeo:**   _with his CUTE ASS_

**_OMG_ **

**_THE WAY_ **

**_OKAY ILL DO IT_ **

**_YOLO YA KNOW_ **

**yeo:** _YEEHAW!!_

 **gigi:** _black haired san,,,, idk ab that one chief the power of that appearance_

 **yeo:** _if my brother didnt like u then he’s sure as hell gonna love u now_

 **yeo:** _he loves dyed hair like??? i still cant believe hes not bald yet with all of the colors he’s done_

 **yunho:** _im really diggin the silver it looks good_

 **joong:** _yES i agree !_

**_i think he would look pretty in any color_ **

**_remember when his hair was brown_ **

**gigi:** _YES! boring horre_

 **yeo:** _ISNDKSNDIDISJDNKD_

 **jongho:** _WAIT WHAT AB SAN’s PARTY_

 **yunho:** _all of us meet at fort sans in an hour_

 **yunho:** _is that enough time??_

 **jongho:** _idk ur the one baking the pie_

 **hwa:** _yea_

 **yeo:** _idk man san lives really far from me :/_

 **yunho:** _sigh i hate pies_

 **yunho:** _san i’m gonna make the pie pls dont be disappointed in it or i’ll cry_

**_omg my heart_ **

**_im soft >:((((_ **

**_i love u guys wtf_ **

**_yunho u never disappoint me!!!_ **

**yunho:** _\_ _(^.^)/_

 **jongho:** _we love u sannie!!_

 **yeo:** _CHOI SAN RIGHTS!!!!_

 **hwa:** _San we love you baby!!!_

 **gigi:** _what hwa said i <3 u _

**joong:** _san = <3 _

**omg csnt see**

**teads**

**in ym eyes**

**make san cry challeneg: succes**

...

He’s being taunted.

In more way than one, really. It’s been days since he’d been on this with her, staying up until the dark nights turned into dark mornings and exhaustion turned into recycled caffeine to be burned out the next day. Muffet tells him, she says that he’d been too frugal with her, dangles it in his face that he was cheap.

San couldn’t _fucking_ afford spider buns!

And it’s only a matter of time until he’s at the point of him being given false hope— he’s been here before, on the last section of the battle and on his last hot cat, when the blacks of the pixel background blended into the shadows of his room and the text blurred into streaks of cotton. His fingers are clammed, like lily pads against the rubber of his thumbsticks, but he keeps trying.

Almost, almost, come on, come _on—_

His heart nearly implodes when there are loud raps at his window, like gunshots in his sensitive ears trained to the 8-bit Hotland theme pitches, and he startles and accidentally bangs his head on his back wall. He sees that he, in fact, lost the game yet again, the bully of the GAME OVER screen melodies tugging at his hair and smacking him square across the face, and he’s mad because he really did get scared easily and he _lost the game again._

He gives a look of death to the window, in a split second of red hot, and sees him. 

Yunho’s horrified, never seeing San look so angry before, eyes holding the want to strangle someone. He’s lucky enough that, when San sees him, his eyes soften again, and he quickly changes his expression and Yunho smiles, he could practically hear him apologizing through the glass of the window.

He opens it, and he sees Yunho’s smile, up close in all of its happy radiance and silver shine, the soft blue sky blending with the forget-me-not dye of his hair. San can’t help but smile back even wider, and as he’s helping Yunho into his room at exactly 10 seconds to 6:06, he can’t help but feel of sun glitters on tranquil morning seas, because he knows his friends actually took their time to come and see him when they didn’t have to.

He thinks he doesn’t deserve them.

Yunho immediately wraps San in a hug that breaks his train of thought, oversized sweater like curtains draped around him and he’s rocking a little.

He smiles.

“Happy birthday, Sannie! I’m sorry I messed up your game!”

San laughs and crinkles his nose as Yunho presses loud fish kisses all over his face, making him giggle from the tickling sensations and the obnoxious _muah!_ sounds he makes. 

Love’s rushing through his chest and running into his veins and into his bloodstreams and bones by now.

“Yunho!” San says, his voice broken up between breaths and his chest inflates even _more,_ lightly pushing an even gigglier Yunho away _._ “It’s okay, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to get mad.” 

“As an apology, I brought a gift.” Yunho raises his eyebrows in awe, as if whatever he brought was the most amazing thing on this planet, and hands it over to San.

It’s a pretty paper bag, decorated with iridescent turquoise on the outside with matching wrapping paper haphazardly stuffed in it, like sawgrass poking through the top.

“Aw, man, thanks.” San gets shy and looks at the gift, away from Yunho’s sweet smile, never going to get used to the feeling of people doing nice things for him. 

“San! Help!” 

San glances up towards the window, seeing Seonghwa’s head bob up, his voice giving up his struggle as he clings to the sandpaper branches of the tree, and with that, there’s hair of melted gold that’s all too familiar grabbing at the trunk below him.

“This is too much work! I’m gonna fall and break something!” San smiles even wider when he hears Mingi’s hollow complaints at the bottom of the tree.

“Come on, Mingi! Don’t be a grandpa!” San shouts softly, not wanting his mom to hear him, and Mingi sighs, defeated and weary, but begins to climb the tree anyway, biting down on the handle of the gift bag he’d brought for San and shoving his hand into an open space in the trunk.

San grabs Seonghwa’s hand and helps him into the window, and he also gives him a little gift bag, brown and tiny (in which San accepted with the blush of corals down to his neck — he hadn’t expected that either). He peeks out of the window and watches Mingi try to climb it after Jongho, who was — impressively and effortlessly — scaling the tree. San hears the familiar sound of an old window with old glass being opened, and he glances up to see Yeosang opening his own window, dressed in a crumply white button-up, a neatly wrapped box with a bow on top in his hand.

“Sang!” San shouts, and Yeosang smiles to him and gives him a wave, quickly grabbing onto the branches below him with his free hand and awkwardly shuffling on his knees over to his window as he has a look of absolute terror on his face from that death tree.

Once Seonghwa was in, Jongho pulled himself in, blowing an air kiss to San as he gets inside of his bedroom, and he hands him a smaller, gift-wrapped box, and San revels in the red holographic this time.

“Where’s...Hongjoong?” Mingi takes in a breath as he slowly walks into San’s room after climbing the tree (with way more effort than he thought was necessary), taking the big, brown gift bag handle out of his mouth and placing it on San’s desk, lightly rubbing the side of his aching bottom lip and leaning against the wall near San’s other window, where he likes to look at the glass sidewalk after storms or the moon after nightfall.

San looks out at the street in realization, and sees the white pierce of the sunlight glinting off of his cherry-red mom van, but no cherry-red Hongjoong.

 He makes a face.

“Didn’t he bring you guys—”

The door opens, immediately silences them like children in trouble at school with the principal, and he sees Hongjoong holding up a plastic-covered cake — hair extra cherry red and smile extra sun bright today —  chilly frost over the covering, and a bag that San assumed was encasing the pie Yunho made. He looks at them, as if nothing was wrong with the picture in front of him, and closes the door with the heel of his shoe, not breaking eye contact with the rest of them as he blindly sets both the cake and pie on San’s wooden desk next to his monitor (and on his keyboard).

“What?”

“Who let you in?” San asks, thinking that maybe he came in through a shorter window downstairs or something, but even then, he couldn’t have gotten in without making too much noise.

“Your mom. I told her I was here to drop this off for you. She told me you were groun-”

There are knocks on his door, and it sends six of them into a terror (San was dying, frozen to the ground and feeling his blood turn to dust, but nobody really noticed, too busy choking on panic and fear themselves for San’s mother).

“That’s my mom!” San mouths harshly to Yunho, and Seonghwa is already opening the window again, getting ready to jump out, maybe hide in the leaves or something.

“Should we leave?” Jongho whispers, and Yeosang’s looking at Yunho who’s looking at San who’s looking at Mingi for answers.

“The closet!” Mingi whispers back, and they sound like bug spray with the way they’re all whispering.

San knows that his mother could absolutely hear them if she listened hard enough. His friends were idiots.

“We can’t all fi-”

“Just go!”

If San was being honest (and not melting internally from fear), it was funny, seeing six boys fit into San’s tiny closet, merely a cut in the wall, big enough for clothes and maybe five pairs of shoes, but they made it work (despite much protest from Jongho from being crammed in the very back corner), and Seonghwa was the odd one out, pressed as flat as he can against San’s clothes and a terrified Song Mingi).

“Come in, mom!”

Hongjoong puts on his best smile and holds the cake a little higher to hide his embarrassment and hopefully any other giveaways that they were up to something, like hiding five of their friends in the closet.

She opens the door just a little, checking on him, eyes flicking to Hongjoong, then to him, then back to Hongjoong again. The air feels weird, and San can’t focus on anything else except on the exact time when his mom leaves his room.

“Hi, guys. I just wanted to see how you’re doing. Hongjoong, when you’re done, feel free to let yourself out. I’m going out to pick something up, but I don’t know how soon I’ll be back. Be safe, you two, okay?”

And she has that same motherly tone that San rarely hears from her, but he smiles and nods anyway, and Hongjoong does the same, his grin more like an uncomfortable grimace, but his mom seems to buy their shaded facade and gives them a smile before quickly shutting the door as she leaves.

He thinks it was nearly too convenient how his mom was leaving for hours, and he had all of his friends in his room, but he doesn’t question it just in case God was a thing and decided to turn things around.

His eyes go wide as he drops his act once the door is closed, a weight of scoldings and extended grounding dissipating from his shoulders, and his friends all pile out of the closet, breathing heavily, as if they were running on the beach in 94-degree weather. San appreciates that they even stopped breathing to try and make less noise.

“You really put me back in there. All of us. Fake!” Yeosang says, and San groans, sees Yunho take a seat on the floor near his bed with that same summer smile and Seonghwa swiveling around in his desk chair.

“I hate you.” San groans, sitting on his bed next to Mingi and paying attention to how the sunlight hits his chocolate floor tiles from the window, thinking about all of the different scenarios of how bad that situation really could have gone. “We could have gotten caught!”

“Okay, but can we eat the cake?” Mingi claps his hands together, completely disregarding San’s heavy concerns, and it honestly feels like a blade splintering through his wooden mind with his wrecked nerves from that tiny and harmless encounter with his mom.

“And we need to dye San’s hair!” Hongjoons pipes up, his smile growing at the thought of doing something so drastic to an uncertain and very thoughtful San.

And it took them hours to get through the presents (most of it was just San on the verge of tears through shy smiles and blushing cheeks, typically) and the cake and pie themselves, and by the time San’s mom got back, the moon was out and the desserts were in the fridge and San kind of smelled like chemicals and the honey hibiscus shampoo he uses and was in his bed, nearly half asleep with the sweets that filled his tummy and the exhaust of trying to get all of that black dye out of his hair in the shower.

He still hadn’t looked in the mirror yet. He thinks that he’s too scared.

The blankets are up to his nose, hiding him away from the blackberry shadows of his room and the sleepy air of the nighttime, when there are raps at his window, soft and urgent. He’s fairly alert, but he still groans anyway, the itch of wanting to stay in bed nearly prickling under his skin, thinking that it’s probably just Yeosang coming to him at this ungodly hour and _didn’t we already get in enough trouble?_

He lightly tugs on the chain on his desk lamp, squinting as bright light fills the dark, and his hair was messy and he probably looks terrible from trying to keep up with the treadmill that was undoubtedly exhaustion from laughing too hard with Hongjoong and stuffing himself with coconut pie, but it was only Yeosang, so he didn’t mind too much.

Turns out that it was _not_ Yeosang, and it’s more than a massive shock when he sees Wooyoung outside his window, pretty eyes gleaming and impossible to miss as he’s standing on the tree branch and good _god,_ he _had_ to come when he looked a mess.

Unbelievable.

Wooyoung’s just as surprised to see him, as if he’s got the wrong house and he’s faced with the family guard dog, pausing and staring at him. San checks his reflection in the glass of the window, hoping that it wasn’t because Wooyoung didn’t expect him to look this ugly at night or something, but the dim light against the black of the sky was shading most of his features and almost all of his hair.

_Holy shit, his hair._

He looks to the window, all the negative things Wooyoung was probably thinking circling around his own head, then remembers where he was and what he was supposed to be doing right now. He quickly lets him in and suddenly feels strange, facing Wooyoung in his oversized maroon sweater and all of the orbital tugs in his grin and pretty ocean eyes as he’s standing with him, alone again.

“Wow, you…” 

San instantly colors.

“Does it look bad? I told them it would look bad.” He feels so self conscious in this moment that, despite the compliments and nice things his friends were saying earlier, they disappear under Wooyoung’s gaze, as if they never even said anything, and he’s covering the top of his head with his hands and already thinking of the last place he’s seen an electric razor in his bathroom.

Wooyoung doesn't say anything at all, and San’s so _fucking_ embarrassed, but he feels Wooyoung take his two hands from his hair and he has one of his pinkies hooked on his while the other handheld the present he had brought for him. He looks nearly awed at San’s inky velvet hair that the lamp reveals.

San can’t look at him, he thinks it’s gross how much Wooyoung’s opinion matters to his fragile eighteen-year-old self-esteem.

“When did this happen?”

“Hongjoong. Today. He...h-he dyed it because he said it would look good.”

“He has good taste. You look hot.”

And San sees he has that same look on his face that he did the day of the dinner. Kind of like how he looks every single time he sees Wooyoung, but he’s only seen returned from Wooyoung a few times now. 

San colors even more.

“Oh, my god, shut up.” He shoos his hand away with an embarrassed smile, and he’s thankful that the dark of nighttime hides his scarlet cheeks, never really going to get used to compliments from Wooyoung, out of anyone, really.

He lowers his head and Wooyoung gives him a small smile, looking at their hands and he suddenly gets nervous, feels a wave of it swell in his chest and he swallows heavily.

“Yeosang tells me you two got grounded because you decided to sneak out at two in the morning. Very dangerous, baby. I know you have stuff to do so I don’t wanna keep you.”

San really tries to ignore the pet name, and his heart beats like timpani in his ears as he hands him a gift-wrapped, crinkly lump, with a brilliant golden bow on top, dazzling in the dimness of his bedroom.

“Happy birthday, Sunny.”

“Thank you.”

San looks at it, and thinks. Wooyoung lightly swings their two hands in front of them as a silent way of telling him that it wasn’t any problem, _really,_ and he lets go, about to leave out of the window, shooting San a smile that he didn’t get to catch, but he still knows it’s there and it still makes him feel sick.

“Wait.”

Wooyoung stops, halfway out of the window, and San thinks it’s nearly unfair how he looks in the moonlight. It seems like Jung Wooyoung looked better in anything dark, any color that added on to what San didn’t know about him, everything that San thinks about, yet he doesn’t get too far because he doesn’t _know_. He stares at him the entire time San is thinking about what to say.

“Really, thank you. I know you’re super busy all the time and you really didn’t need to do this but I appreciate it. Please don’t feel like you owe me anything, I-”

Jung Wooyoung kisses him right in the middle of his sentence, like he ran face-first into a brick wall, and it’s so quick and soft that San can’t even kiss him back, and when he pulls away, he’s kind of mad.

“Just open it, loser.” Wooyoung grins, and he quickly leaves the window as well as a dumbfounded San, standing there and stuck with time, soon staring at the now empty tree branches, barely noticing him go back into Yeosang’s room and shut the window.

Oh.

San shuts his own window, and with shaking, popsicle stick legs, sits on his bed, right in the way of the lamp’s shine, and lightly runs the pad of his fingers over the smooth sticky of the wrapping paper, trying to guess what was inside. He tears open the paper gently once he comes up short, always being one to like surprises, but he accidentally tugs up something green along with the sparkly blue wrapping that felt like it belonged to the gift itself

He squints, feeling the texture of it in between his thumb and forefinger, and he runs the pad of it over the paper inside.

It’s a dollar.

He makes a face, hooks a finger in the hole he made within the wrapping paper and softly rips off the rest, sees a bouquet of dollar bills rolled up into pretty roses and petunias and poppies with blue pen ink on it and there’s even a tiny sunflower in the very back, all held by bent up, multicolored pipe cleaners stuck into a cube of floral foam. San finds this funny, has a small smile pulling at his mouth when he opens the little letter taped onto one of the fuzzy stems holding the flowers up. 

It’s then when he remembers he forgot to pay Wooyoung the day of the dinner, and he tears his attention away from the letter and to the money garden in his lap. After that first week and a half, San can’t remember pulling single bills out of his wallet — at an impressive pace at that — and handing them to Wooyoung after a kiss to the cheek or being called a pet name.

San looks at it, and he makes a face at them, because _god,_ he really gave Wooyoung these many singles within a week? 

Jeez.

But he goes back to the note, sees Wooyoung’s cute handwriting and he’s reminded of the time he brought him lunch, and he’s smiling to himself at nearly midnight like an idiot, pressing a warm hand to his cheeks. 

He reads it as best as he can in the frayed light of the lamp, thinking Wooyoung really did go out of his way for him, and he feels his grin radiate.

_to you, sunny. because you and i both know that you are worth more than money to me._

_-_ _bubs._

San stops smiling.


	18. san needs balloons!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also! i've been hearing such nice things about this au and i just wanna say thank u!! every comment that i hear from some of my friends and moots and anon messages!! makes me so happy!! so thank you, you guys are really motivating!
> 
> ive met so many cool people from this so please dm me if you see this and have a twitter! @petalhwas  
> or if u dont wanna dm me but still wanna talk my cc is in my carrd! ptlhws.carrd.co  
> pLS i wanna be friends w you guys! 
> 
> enjoy!

Sunrises.

Ever since that night, San came to find out that sunrises didn’t always come in the form of an Earth cycle. They were found in many, many things, that San hadn’t been open to looking for until recently. He’s noticed that they come in they way Yunho’s lips part into a grin that told of nothing but happiness whenever he saw him, or how Seonghwa’s eyes gleam when he’s explaining his next art piece. He finds it in how Wooyoung holds his hand whenever they went on their scheduled fake dates, noticed that they come in the form of Wooyoung’s mellifluous laughs and bright smiles that remind him of sunset beaches on a summer’s eve, and he’s noticed that they come in the thoughts that take over his head whenever he’s lying in bed and thinking about his friends or his mother or his Wooyoung. 

The dinner went smoothly again. 

San had actually found himself laughing and enjoying his time around his mom and Wooyoung (except for when he accidentally called Wooyoung “bubs” in front of her, and _that_ earned Wooyoung another bought of calming San down from his embarrassment high while his mom cleaned up after them). Even worse, considering that she invited him over for dinner whenever, and he played along with it, asking to come again every Sunday. 

Even _more_ _worse,_ she agreed.

And then she apologized to him, told him that him being happy was more important than her own beliefs, and she hugged him and told him that she would try to keep an open mind for him and he felt like she was made of the universe’s most special when she did. She was stellar streams that he could feel in his bones, and it took him back to the times he _did_ miss, when he was a child and came home from a particularly bad day at school and she would be waiting for him, waiting to give him the universe.

And in that same night, she told him that she loved him for the first time since he was 12.

San cried in Wooyoung’s room, vulnerable and even more to Wooyoung’s soft petal kisses to the top of his head, to his tear-stained skin, to his knuckles and forehead and the dimples that left indents on his cheeks when he was finished and felt so _fucking_ stupid for crying in front of him, and for the first time in a while, his sun had finally risen after years of hidden darkness and relentless nightfalls. 

A sunrise that nobody else could see, except for him. His own Earth cycle. 

San doesn’t think he could get any brighter.

… 

It’s morning now, both outside of the window of Wooyoung’s bedroom and inside of his own home.

“Come on, Sunny. Wake up.”

San’s in the purgatory between falling asleep again, and opening his eyes to the sting of the morning, and his voice sounds like leftover rain puddles in the warm autumn, and he feels something warm on his cheek and is familiar with it enough for him to heat up with the stars that are still glowing in the farthest twilight atop of them. 

Wooyoung kissed his face.

And San remembers how much a face kiss would have cost him, the toll amount, and feels the wiggling urge to smile at the memories, at the bouquet of money flowers near his analog clock. He doesn’t budge, though, manages to focus on the fact that he was really too tired to move and he was the type to wait for someone to scream at him to get up rather than soft coaxing. 

Newton’s 4th unidentified law of motion or something.

“Sunny~. Wake up, please? I want attention.”

San makes a noise, coming from the lowest of his throat and he moves his head a little bit in slight acknowledgment, eyes still closed, and Wooyoung kisses his cheek again.

“Please?”

San makes a noise of rebuttal again, can’t help the grin that comes breaking through his features, never knowing until recently just how needy Jung Wooyoung actually was, and he runs the hand that had been strewn across San’s tummy through his messy, newly black hair. San is awake now, unfortunately, but he doesn’t move yet. He needs a few minutes.

Wooyoung is still for a moment, and San’s wondering what the hell he’s up to, picturing him staring and thinking and he heats up with self-conscious, until he finds himself giggling under his lips when he presses fish kisses all over his cheek, then moves down to his throat and San is scrunching up his nose in laughs.

“Wooyoung! S-stop! It tickles!”

“Give me attention,” Wooyoung pouts, and just like Yeosang, lightly pinches San’s cheeks in between his thumb and forefinger, knowing how annoying he was, but dismissed it with the reasoning of it being for a good cause.

Attention.

San hums in lazy acknowledgment to him as he stretched himself out, and Wooyoung leans up on his elbows to look at San. When San finally opens his eyes and glances at him, it’s like he had something to say, the glimmer in his eyes with an idea right on the tip of his tongue, but Wooyoung can’t fish it out. Something weird about the way San’s hair was like whisps against the black pillows, how his paper skin held glow bugs underneath it as the morning sun painted him in a hushed lemon light and made him look ethereal this morning against his dark sheets. He takes this time to look, to really _look_ and see how much of San he’s missed with all the time he’d been here.

He thinks San is pretty, like how a glass vase full of dark red roses would look.

No, he thinks more than that. Like the sunsets of Santorini, Wooyoung thinks San was made up of beautiful violet and orange hues, and he smiled of the brightest Orion when night fell. Wooyoung loved when San smiled; loved, even more, when he knew he was the reason behind it. And for him to be able to lie beside the prettiest of magic, all wrapped up in the sleepy boy next to him, made him think that he’s got to be the luckiest guy in the world.

But Wooyoung would never tell him that. 

“Wh-why are you...stop staring at me.” San turns his face away from Wooyoung and colors soft poppy in the light, his eyes gleaming with the streaks of sun from the window blinds.

Wooyoung smiles once he catches himself, kind of like when you’re shown something you didn’t think was possible, pulls himself back into conscious and gets embarrassed.

“San, you look pretty with black hair. I like it a lot.”

Okay, maybe he would tell him. Only a little.

“Wooyoung, shut up!” San lightly pushes his cheek, and he smiles underneath his hand, bringing up one of his own to lace his fingers with San’s.

In the near month that they’ve been together, Wooyoung noticed that San had no problem holding hands when it was just them when they were underneath black sheets or in the tree during the sun’s fall. In front of anyone else, on the other hand, holding pinkies was nearly pushing it. Of course, Wooyoung jumped at any given opportunity to just hold him. 

Hands, fingers, cheeks, anything, just _San._

“Okay, but you have to kiss me first.” Wooyoung holds his lips against the back of San’s hand, lingers for a bit and silently asks for whatever he had been wanting, eyes like candy in the morning light, and San can’t help but roll his eyes with a smile.

“You’re so annoying.” 

He gives in, ignores the trembling in the hand that Wooyoung’s holding and ignores the pool of nervousness that’s quickly filling up his chest.

He finds it easier to do stuff like this, though, kissing Wooyoung in the warmth of the morning, stuff like that.

San also finds it easier to get lost in him, no matter how many ways he’s tried to twist and turn it, no matter how many times he’s tried to focus on literally _anything else_. So much so that he never uses his head when being around him, too invested with the drags of cherry lips over his own and the touches of warm steam to his skin. 

Seems like he never uses his ears until it’s too late, either, and there’s a soft knock at the door that San didn’t even hear until it was absolutely too late and he wishes he was still sleeping.

Wooyoung breaks from him quickly, as if he was shot by a rocket, and San’s heart is now swelling in his throat once Yeosang comes in, bedhead messy and cheeks puffed, eyes tired with the strain of waking up today.

“Wooyoung, I need to borr-” His voice trails off as he looks at San, shirtless because it got really hot in here sometimes, looks at Wooyoung, shirtless because it really did get hot in here sometimes, then back to San, who looked so incredibly guilty, and it was then when he realized how horrible this looked and _god can he just go back to sleep!_  

“Oh.”

“Yeosang, Christ’s sake! I didn’t say you could come in!” 

“Really, you guys? San, you’re _here_? This is why you said you couldn’t go to get ice cream with me at three am? Because y’all were—”

 _“Yeosang!”_ San groans into his hands, fingers curling into his hair in frustration and unbridled embarrassment (and slight annoyance because Yeosang really _did_ have to ruin everything).

“No, I get it, San. You hate your best friend.” Yeosang says, and walks into Wooyoung’s bedroom anyway, making a beeline straight for the bathroom. “You ditched me for Wooyoung. My own brother. Can’t believe this.” 

Yeosang always had a knack for making awkward situations slightly less terrible, but even now, when he’s arguing with Wooyoung about taking his blow dryer, he can’t help but tune them out and only pay attention to Yeosang always, _always_ catching them at the worst times. Did he have a black cloud over his head or something? Was that it? Did he have a red string of bad luck tied to his wrist? Was getting embarrassed 24/7 a personality trait?

The door closes, and shuts the two in their bubble again, but it’s already been popped and San doesn’t feel like building another one back up again.

“Wooyoung, I’m going to jump out of the window. I hate Yeosang.” San says, voice muffled as he still has two hands over his heated face, and he hears Wooyoung chuckle as he sits up from his place on the bed, throwing his legs over the side to stand.

“Yeah, well. Me too, he’s my little brother.” San hears Wooyoung groan as he stretched himself out, hearing a bone pop and San thinks that sounded a little too loud to be normal for a nineteen-year-old, but he keeps quiet. “You wanna grab breakfast with me?”

“Where?” San peeks at Wooyoung walking into his bathroom through the slits in between his fingers, needing a few more minutes to sort of getting over his nth wave of humiliation in the span of what he's been doing…whatever it is he’s been doing with Wooyoung since about a month ago.

“Santana?”

“Aw, yeah!” San gets excited, nearly forgets about Yeosang when the image of pancakes from Santana flashes across his hunger-stricken mind, and springs out of the bed like he was late to school or something, following Wooyoung into the bathroom.

He finds him looking at him through the mirror, mouth full of blue foam from the toothpaste he’s scrubbing onto his teeth. San reaches over him and pulls out the toothbrush he’d brought with him yesterday afternoon from the holder, following suit, and soon Wooyoung’s bumping him with his hip as he tries to spit it out in the sink.

“Oo-ung!” San tried to speak over the mouthful of foam, but Wooyoung shakes his head, letting the water run on his hand for a bit.

“Sorry, Sunny. As protector of the sacred ceramic bowl, I cannot let you taint it. Unless you have the password.” Wooyoung raises his eyebrows in mock curiosity, turning off the faucet and pressing a wet hand to the stubble on his chin to prepare it for the shaving cream he had ready in the corner of the countertop.

“Hm...pleath?” San asks, the foam sitting in his mouth and he hated the feeling of it, but he humors Wooyoung anyway.

Wooyoung tsks. 

“Nope. Very close, though. You have two more tries if you’d like to continue.” Wooyoung rubs the shaving cream onto the bottom half of his face, looking at San through the mirror.

“How ‘bout...San loves Oo-ung.” 

Wooyoung makes a face of despair, shakes his head at San as he’s spreading the cream over his top lip.

“You’re _ever_ so close, baby.”

“Oo-ung love San.” San tries, holding the foam in his mouth and his jaw was kind of tired, but his tone gives away to Wooyoung that he thinks this is one of his better tries, and Wooyoung gives him a sense of hope with the smile he’s got on his face.

He shakes his head.

“It was actually ‘lotion’, but I’ll let it slide, just this once.” Wooyoung smears shaving cream on the tip of San’s nose with his forefinger, and he lightly shoos him away with the best smile he could manage, spitting it into the sink.

That stupid sacred ceramic bowl.

“Do you have mouthwash?” San asks, rinsing out the sink and wiping the shaving cream off of his nose, watching Wooyoung lightly drag a black razor down his face and onto any stubbles that he might have had.

“Bottom cabinet. It hurts your mouth because it has alcohol in it, please be careful.”

San smiles at the concern as he bends down to get the mouthwash out of Wooyoung’s cabinet. He waterfalls it, too lazy to look for the tiny cups, mouth indeed burning like acid was cleaning his teeth rather than harmless fluoride and alcohol, and his eyes water and he feels the coolness in his nose, but he acts like it was nothing and holds it in his mouth for a little more, spitting it out with an eagerness that he hoped Wooyoung hadn’t caught.

“Do you want to shower?” Wooyoung asks, and San shakes his head. 

“It’s okay. I was going to run home really quick and do it. Meet back here in twenty minutes?” 

Wooyoung nods. “Meet back here in twenty minutes.” 

And Wooyoung winks at him before he goes to turn on the shower water, nearly erased whatever plan San had in his head to go home and do whatever he was supposed to do at that moment, but he catches himself and quickly leaves Wooyoung’s room to head into Yeosang’s, the hallway significantly less intimidating than when he was here weeks ago.

He knocks, and immediately the door opens, and Yeosang’s there, looking the exact same as he did when he walked into Wooyoung’s room, except there’s a juice box in his left hand and hair is lighter in the morning. 

“San, hello.” Yeosang steps back so that San can come in, and he sees he’s playing Undertale, typically, the controller left haphazardly strewn in the beanbag chair in the corner of the room where all the dust bunnies were.

San makes a kissy face at Yeosang in greeting, who smiles and rolls his eyes in return, before opening his unlocked window and throwing a leg out of the ledge, lightly feeling out a spot on the tree branch to step on with the sole of his shoe.

“Where do you think you’re going, young man? You still have one more day of being grounded.” 

“Technically, I only have two more hours because mom grounded me as soon as I woke up. _You,_ however, have until tonight. Loser.” San sticks his tongue out at Yeosang, and he makes a face, always being up for competition.

“I’ll tell your mom right now that you’re sneaking out with Woo.” 

“I’ll bring you back a yogurt smoothie if you keep quiet.” 

Yeosang squints, and that tells San he’s getting ready to milk him for all of his worth. “Banana mango strawberry? With a chicken meal basket?”

“Chicken basket, banana mango strawberry.” San _really_ squints. “ _Large.”_

Yeosang purses his lips and raises his eyebrows, telling San that it was enough, and he goes back to his Undertale game, sitting in his beanbag chair and running a hand through his fluffy hair.

“Wow, I wonder how my window just opened itself like that. Hopefully, the wind closes it back soon.” 

San rolls his eyes with a smile, leaving the window and closing it behind him while (quite dangerously) balancing on the edge of where the wood meets the house and the branch itself, still feeling scared even if the branches were nearly unrealistically wide, crossing the big oak tree to his own house. 

How very convenient.

… 

San and Wooyoung had decided to walk; it was chilly out, despite it being nearly the middle of summer, and it wasn’t enough to make San completely hate the weather for a split second, but enough to make him be okay with going outside for more time than he needed to be. Wooyoung had him smiling, just because of something he had said.

Okay, more of something be _hadn’t_ said.

He told him he should paint his nails black, to really nail the head on the goth scene, and San didn’t think it was too bad of an idea, despite Wooyoung’s giggles through dismissals of it. And he looks down at their hands, pinkies hooked around the other in a safety net, and with the way Wooyoung’s swinging their hands in between each other was a gentle reminder to San that Wooyoung was not his boyfriend, and that Wooyoung was only keeping this up for his mom. 

But he still smiles, despite the salt and pepper tinge of the fact that this was for show. He smiles, maybe because he knows that, for now, Wooyoung cared for him. He cared for him and was doing things for him that made him see stars with every blink, made his chest inflate with the summer horizons and tawny dusks with every small action, attention to his detail, every compliment. He smiles because he thinks it’s nice how Wooyoung remembered that he’d rather hold pinkies than hands, would rather be outside in the cold, would rather get breakfast with him even though it was nearing 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. 

He smiles because he thinks it’s nice how Wooyoung is loving him.

But only for now.

“Did you have enough to eat?” Wooyoung asks, words like a pick in San’s ice block head, and he blinks himself back into reality, and they’re turning a quiet corner into their even quieter neighborhood, and San sees the striking green street markers stuck in the slightly overgrown grass near the playground.

San nods, holding Yeosang’s smoothie in his other hand while Wooyoung held the basket, because there was no other way to hold this terribly freezing drink, and he’d rather go through a little discomfort himself than have Wooyoung do it.

“Okay.”

Okay, okay.

San thinks that those words never really carried as much weight as they did. He thinks he made them too godly, put them high on an all too overpowering pedestal to the point where he was uneasy, just hearing that. 

But they never really meant much.

The July winds melt through his hair, hug around his shoulders and kiss his exposed fingers as they make it to their houses, and Wooyoung had been silent, yet speaking ever so loudly and San can’t help but flick his eyes over to Wooyoung’s window and his cheeks smoke out ruby when his memories surface to him.

“This smoothie is cold. I’ll go run it up to Yeosang before I go home.”

Wooyoung nods, takes a few quick steps in front of him towards the door as he fishes the keys from the pocket of his black jeans, and hurriedly unlocks the door, opening it for him and San listens to the creaks of the hinges rather than looking up at Wooyoung’s smile, and goes in after giving him a small _thank you,_ both for the door and handing him food _,_ voice of sugarcane and he catches the color on San’s cheeks and smiles a little bit bigger, shyness on his lips and flattery in his laugh lines at the fact that he could make San blush so, so easily.

Wooyoung thinks San is cute.

Yeosang’s door is slightly ajar, and it’s quiet, save for the familiar symphonies of action and constant screaming from Bakugo, and he pushes it open slightly to see Yeosang on his bean bag chair, looking at the tiles in his floor with his phone pressed against his ear. He has a tiny smile on his face, where his teeth peek out just slightly, and San immediately knows who’s voice is speaking back to him on the other line.

He lowers his own once Yeosang sees him walk in.

“Banana mango strawberry and chicken basket. Slightly melted, just how you like it.”

“Thank you, Sannie! Hwa, say hi to San.”

San takes the phone from Yeosang, replaces the smoothie and food with it and a slightly wet, empty hand, hearing his voice on the other line, and instantly, he’s radiating a smile that came from his heart at the fructose drip of his words.

_Hi, little one. Good day?_

San gets shy now, because he _was_ having a good day, an awesome, spectacular, amazing day, and to think Jung Wooyoung was the sole cause of it made his stomach churn, like soft waves against beach rocks.

“Yes! Are you?” San smiles, and Yeosang’s suctioned onto the plastic red straw plugged into his smoothie, holding it with two hands as if they were made of feathers and the drink was a heavyweight.

_Yes, now that I heard your voice! Rest well tonight, okay?_

San could practically see Seonghwa over the phone, most likely preoccupied with something, but he stopped just for him and he’s smiling and giving off a parental love for him that it makes his heart heavy with starshine.

“Okay. You too.”

_I’ll try, just for you._

“Bye, Hwa, I love you!”

And Seonghwa tells him he loves him even more, and he smiles when he gives the phone back to Yeosang. He’s about to leave his room, foot nearly out the door when he hears Yeosang breathe out a smile, and while he’s closing his door back, he catches the tiny, shy _i love you too_ escaping Yeosang’s mouth as he’s still speaking on the phone. 

And as if he’s swelling with Alcor and Saiph and everything in between, he smiles, but hides it from Yeosang and leaves his room quickly. 

San really thinks that the two were special for each other.

… 

 **woo:** _hi baby_

 **woo:** _the sunset is soon_

 **woo:** _the tree is empty_

 **woo:** _the woo is alone and bored_

**_the san is on his way_ **

It’s about 5:18 when San leaves his bedroom window, he knows because he looked at his bouquet of money flowers for the millionth time in that hour, and his clock had been set right behind the floral foam. He meets Wooyoung on the branches today, found him in a black long sleeve and even darker sweats to match, silently telling him that he had been in bed before coming here.

He was good at that — knowing things about Wooyoung that he never said aloud.

The pretty bisque of the sun’s rays was stark over the two of them, lighting up Wooyoung’s skin with golden embers.

“How come you’re out here?” San asks, lightly kicking his legs back and forth as he sits straddling the tree branch, knees touching Wooyoung’s, comforting in the way that tells him there was someone else here. 

He did things like this with Yeosang, too. Whenever they were together — being with one another in silence or complete chaos — San always liked to be touching someone. 

Yet another safety net, he supposed.

“Because. The sun was setting and I’m tired of being in my room. It gets boring. Why are you so far away?”

Wooyoung pouts, holding his arms out for San, and he scoots his butt up over the branches, his legs now over Wooyoung’s thighs and he quickly gets comfortable being pressed against him. It didn’t help at all when Wooyoung wrapped his own arms around San’s shoulders, blocking him away from the cool breezes of the summer and from the world itself.

He might fall asleep on him at this rate.

“We just went out today.”

Wooyoung’s mouth stretches into a grin of what San only knew as mischief, and he shuts his mouth, feels the little uplift in the corner of his smile fall once he realized what he had said.

“Remember when you said you wouldn’t go out with me? Looks like I finally got you on that date today.”

San lets an embarrassed sigh escape him and he hides his face in his hands and into Wooyoung’s chest. He’s kind of mad how Wooyoung _still_ has the ability, the audacity even, to still make him blush and shy up just by talking.

It’s been a month, for fuck’s sake.

“Shut up!”

Wooyoung chuckles, like dragonfly wings, and kisses the top of San’s hair twice, and he turns his head on Wooyoung’s chest to face the direction of the watercolor sunset, that stupid smile still plastered on his face, and like oils, the yellows and purples smear across the sky and put San in a sense of protection under the candlewick clouds.

“Dinner’s next Sunday. Think we could keep this up?” Wooyoung asks, voice soft and low and right in San’s ear and it feels like that’s the only melody he’s ever heard in a while.

He nods lightly in the crook of Wooyoung’s neck, snaking his arms around his waist and hugging him loosely, thinking back to the second dinner and then to the first, and there are dimples pinching his cheeks as he smiles, nodding.

“No doubt. Me and you make a pretty good team.”

And in the quiet noise of the birds calling and the clouds murmuring to them as they move across the sky above them, he sees that apparently, it’s not just Earth that makes him feel like this. As he’s lying against Wooyoung, watching the dreamy sky and listening to the beats of his heart, he realizes that there was something so beautiful about the way the sky melts with Wooyoung, something so pretty about the way he stands out above everyone and everything, while being cloaked in black mysteries and the navy skies of midnight themselves.

He thinks back to the last time he was bathed in gilded light like this, the last time he was dressed in Earth’s finest gold and painted with halcyon. He remembers everything he felt, everything he was thinking and everything he wanted to do on that day.

“You seem to like Earth a lot. It makes you happy, right?”

“Yeah.” San’s taken out of his head for a minute, and looks at the ground that was way farther beneath them than he remembered, into the grass blades dotted with dandelions and daisies, then back to the silhouetted trees and neighboring houses against the sky. “They’re euphoric to me.”

“Euphoric, hm? That’s nice. I need to take you to the beach more often, then. But at reasonable hours, so you don’t get grounded. _Again_.” That earns Wooyoung another groan from San, which in turn, got him another laugh from Wooyoung. 

Seems like Wooyoung loved to laugh at his pain.

“Anything else that brings you happiness like this? Asking for...future reference.”

And San can’t help but pull back to look over him while he does, that question triggering something in him that made him want to see him. In that moment, San falls in love with the way the sunset kisses his velvet skin, with all of the windchime laughs he lets out in the soft blushes of the mornings and all of the mapped out touches he’s pressed to his treasure trove skin. 

It’s weird, but San sees waterfalls in Wooyoung. 

He sees rainbows and blooming flowers and dewdrop valleys and auroras and parades of the Earth’s most beautiful phenomena in him. He would watch the stars settle in his heart and listen to the trees billow with his voice as he spoke, all day if he could. San was silent for a moment, but gives him a tiny grin and brushes his silver hair out of his face, lost. 

But not in a bad way, not at all.

And when he says it, he feels like a supernova, exploding in a seam of nothingness, yet feeling all of the power in the world and like he shined almost too brightly for what he could handle.

Invincible.

“You.”

Wooyoung tenses, and stares at San, like he wanted to talk to him, to tell him something. He’s searching for something in his eyes, and they flick back and forth between his own and San could practically see what he was thinking.

“Really?”

San falls sheepish, but he nods anyway, looking at literally anywhere else other than Wooyoung’s eyes anymore.

He opts for looking at his waterfall lips, blooming flower button nose, his starfall skin.

He feels his hand on the back of his neck, pulling him close, and Wooyoung kisses him like how the moon shines, soft and calming and inviting, and San is falling again. He realizes this, that he has no parachute, no balloon strings to hold onto to keep him floating, no mattress at the bottom to break his fall. 

But he’s falling.

He doesn’t know if he would stop, especially now. 

 _Especially_ for Wooyoung and his sliver-of-hope rainbow heart.


	19. something bugs me about the way you lick your envelopes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!
> 
> sorry this update took so long!! i was writing until i finished the au - and we did! this is gonna have ab 26 chapters in total so if u are bored pls read this and tell me how i did :( they might feel a little weird at first but my brain was like angst and i was like what and she said u gotta so here it is
> 
> pls dm me on twitter! i've met so many nice people online because of this au and i love talking to u guys! 
> 
> p.s. this chapter mayyy contain a little more kissing than what we're used to but it's for plot purposes that i mentioned in a cc like months ago! it's nothing nsfw when i said yall will never get smut trust me 
> 
> pls enjoy the rest of the au! i appreciate u guys!

He’s fucking _drunk._

The way San goes completely weak for alcohol, feels the urge to fill his body with liquid poison just to loosen up more, but only in a party setting, was detrimental to his spirit. To willingly get drunk and act like a fool depending on the volume of the shitty EDM playing on cheap-expensive stereos and what shade of black Jung Wooyoung was wearing today was a form of self-hatred, San was convinced.

He doesn’t really know the logistics behind _how_ or _why_ he ended up here.

Jongho knew a lot of people, knew a lot of college kids who threw nice parties and Mingi had mentioned wanting to win one match of beer pong, just one, _once,_ with a group of people _._ And San had thought that maybe he and his friends would get together and just play, have fun and maybe fill the cups up with orange soda instead, order pizza and watch cartoons after. 

He definitely hadn’t expected an invite from an engineering major named Jackson, and he _definitely_ hadn’t expected to wind up in a huge apartment near Yunho and Wooyoung’s college campus, filled nearly to the brim with unfamiliar faces and the smell of marijuana being passed around, the smell of cheap colognes substantially heavy, swimming chin deep in the clouds with the  seaweeds of reality tugging at his toes.

San had wanted a break from the party scene because he was only eighteen, there was always time for a party, never enough time for naps, but he went anyway. It only took _but my brother’s gonna be there, so you have to go!_ for him to finally give in, and he hated how he was swayed so easily by a moonlit pond smile and the promise of getting into something that would probably cause him embarrassment later involving Wooyoung.

He told himself he needed to work on his can’t-say-no problem.

The music is streaky from when he walked in, makes San think of metal poles and weird substances and neon blue hair in pigtails, but he flicks his tongue over his chapped lips and avoids eye contact with the drunk girls with smeared mascara and the boys with lipstick stains on their mouths and throats, squishing past a crowd of sweaty ragdoll bodies with a cup full, an elixir of hangover and regret in his hand, but again, that wasn’t a problem for him yet. 

He didn’t care, not now.

He meets the familiar Seonghwa and Mingi on one of the black cloth couches, in the cloudy living room where the bookshelves were and Jackson’s computer desk sat. The lights were deep red, flooding the entire apartment in crimson, and San thought his friends looked nearly antipodal, showered in the deep rose petal shine. He throws Mingi a grin as he sits on the couch next to Seonghwa, feeling like leather, numb to the cushions underneath him.

“San, hi!” Mingi calls from the opposite end of the couch, his phone turned sideways and the brightness turned down to its dimmest, telling San that he was centering himself by playing a game, not lit enough to make an idiot of himself.

Yet.

“Hi, little one.” Seonghwa smiles softly at him, eyes blown and glossy like heated glass, and San could barely make out what he said in the sidechain beat of the blaring music, but he gets the best idea.

Seonghwa parts his mouth, peach lips stuck on the sentence he was about to say, and he glances behind him, at who San assumed was Mingi, and then back to him, light eyebrows holding question. He has something written on his face, San too far into space to really catch it, and he leans closer, lowering his voice, words coming out of his mouth like slow playback.

“Don’t look, not now…but I think…that boy is…that boy is _into_ you~.”

San’s heart sinks, even when he was under the influence, he was still terrible with confrontation. He heats up like how the fourth of July blooms, and he makes a face, not really preparing to deal with something like this.

“Wh-what? Mingi?”

He hopes to god that Seonghwa was too messed up to realize that it was actually (hopefully) Mingi. But Seonghwa shakes his head and brings his hand over his mouth to hide his giggles, and his cheeks are so high, so much higher than San remembers, and he finds himself smiling, too. But it’s not genuine, it’s more awkward looking and timid because he was nervous for what he was about to say.

“Not Mingi, someone else. Short, lots of eye makeup. San, he’s… _looking_ at you.”

San looks behind his shoulder, hoping to god that they didn’t make eye contact and he’d have to think of things to say if he came over here, or even worse, he—

 _Shit_.

San gives him a smile. He had to admit to himself, the boy looks pretty in the strawberry light, in a way that you’d see most girls try to strive for, with the way his lips are tinted cherry and his autumn scorched hair curls down in the middle of his forehead, and San thinks that’s one of the most dangerous ways to look without much effort.

Almost reminds him of that guy in his macro class that he’s been talking to recently. 

And San panics when he begins to come over, hand halfway in his black jeans pocket and red cup in the other. He’s got sparkling seas in his eyes and there’s black pencil eyeliner smoked out around them in a way that makes San start blushing and looking down at his lap. Wooyoung did the same thing for the party, San thinks that maybe it’s a trend, for dangerous-looking guys to make San’s heart and body and entire fucking being melt with that _stupid_ eyeliner.

“Hi.” 

He sits down next to him, to his left, where his dimple prods deeper when he smiles, and San’s heart immediately swells in his ears, and he could only hear it beating erratically against the kicks of the stereo. His cheeks immediately flush, and he’s lucky the hue of the apartment breaks down his face and doesn’t call attention to the fact that San might have been interested in what he had to say.

He kind of was, but he didn’t need to know all of that.

“H-hi.”

“I couldn’t help but notice you over here. I think you’re stunning.” The boy looks up at San, eyes gleaming despite the room being dark, and San goes wide-eyed after hearing that. “I’m sorry...that might be a little disrespectful, but...”

San nearly stops breathing. Stunning? Is he kidding? He looks at him, and he’s timid underneath his leather jacket and his pretty fall leaf hair and his ocean eyes. He kind of reminds San of himself, and he can’t help but smile into his lap because it’s nice to know that someone else gets as nervous as he does in front of pretty people, and even nicer to know that he’s the pretty person in question.

He can’t believe it. 

“Th-thank you.” 

He never looks back at the guy again, but he could feel his eyes sitting on him, heavy and important, and he grips his cup a little bit tighter. He has about three different scenarios of what this guy could say to him, all playing out in his head as he tries to ignore the loud music and focus on what he could respond with.

It was stupid, but San’s mind is broken up into bits at this point. He was never good at confrontation, never good at talking to people, never good at receiving compliments.

Especially that last bit. No one ever gave him a lot of compliments, so he never practiced.

“I know this is straightforward, and pardon me for that, but...I’d like to take you out this weekend. Maybe Friday night?”

Oh. San hadn’t thought of this.

He swallows, and finds his thoughts in the mix of blue alcohol in his red solo cup, and he looks to Seonghwa, but was faced with an empty seat instead. He remembers this happening with Minhyuk, not even two days ago, asking him out like this in front of an audience of an empty school hallway, but he doesn’t feel as awkward or uncomfortable. Minhyuk was a lot smoother, talked to San a little more before asking. Maybe it was because they had to do the macro project together, or maybe it was because San knew a bit about him, or _maybe_ it was because there wasn’t such terrible EDM blasting into his ears.

San preferred Minhyuk in this instance.

He swallows back the last of his punch, nearly gags at the sweet juice and bitter liquors, and flicks his tongue over his lips, coated in the thin spice of expensive alcohol.

“Hey, can you...go refill my drink? It was the punch.”

The guy looks at him weirdly, but he nods with a tiny smile and takes San’s cup and he hopes that he can’t feel the sweat sticking to the outside and that he wasn’t too rude in changing the subject like that. He bounces his foot on the wooden floor below him to gather himself as the boy leaves, his head giving off red flashes and alarms and he was so incredibly nervous. He was never used to stuff like this, and for a stranger to tell him he was stunning? And wanted to take him out? 

_God._

“Who was that?” 

San blinks, remembers that he’s at a party and remembers that he was here with other people, and he looks up right into the eyes of Wooyoung. 

He gives San a familiar blue can with gold lettering on it, and San perches himself up to see if he could find the guy in the crowd of dancing bodies, but he gives up before he even starts trying. “It’s beer.”

He takes a huge sip of it, even more liquid courage for him, and he feels like he’s halfway into the sky again after the fourth sip and Wooyoung sits next to him, spreading his legs and taking up space and San crosses his own, not doing good in handling Wooyoung in any space, really,  whether it be this party or his own home.

“A boy. He—” his voice skips, feels the liquor come up into his throat, but he ignores it, “he wants to take me out~!”

“Like on a date?” Wooyoung asks, eyebrows raised and dark eyes smudged, and San nods, can’t help the smile that’s made its way to his lips when he sees Wooyoung run a hand through his silver hair, only doing that after Yeosang barges into his room or his laptop crashes during an important essay.

He was annoyed.

“Called me... _stunning_.” He drinks more of the beer, smelling the aromas of hard liquors on Wooyoung and he was absolutely going to regret this in the morning.

“He _what_?”

“He said I was stunning and wanted to take me out on Friday...” He’s feeling extra bold today. “Like Minhyuk.”

“Minhyuk? Did you say yes?” Wooyoung asks, dark eyebrows coming together as he leans into San to hear him better over the loud crash cymbals and double kickdrum of the song washing over them.

“I asked if he could go refill—hey! Look, that’s him!” San lowers his voice to a harsh whisper, sees him looking around and he feels like acid, uncrossing his legs and sitting up a little bit on the cloth couch. He makes eye contact with him and all of his smokey eyeliner and messy autumn hair and the cool piercings in the top of his ear, and San returns the little smile he gives him, holding up his cup that San assumed was filled with now lukewarm punch.

And he nearly fades when there’s warmth on his inner thigh, smile fading just as quickly as his heart drops to his stomach. He sees the reflective silver of rings and stressed veins that run like tunnels under taut, tanned skin, and he swallows. Wooyoung squeezes slightly, silently telling him _something,_ reminding San of umbra and the rain that falls east of Meghalaya, and he feels the heat of whatever message he’s sending spreading into his skin and blood vessels and arteries and entire fucking being.

The boy comes back, staring at Wooyoung with prying and curious eyes, and San assumes there was that glance from Wooyoung that he’d only see in hell, so he pretends it doesn’t make him start sweating under his palms and takes a sip from his beer can and he’s literally caught between a rock and a hard place, and _god,_ he should have stayed home and finished his novel.

The fact that Jackson’s lights were deep red didn’t help him either.

“San, is my offer to go out still in the table?”

The guy lowers his mouth to San’s ear, and says it loud enough for both Wooyoung and San to hear, but San’s too busy trying not to look at the people passing by, their eyes going directly to Wooyoung and San and they looked away, as if watching a murder happen, but even they were too intimidated to stay here. 

San was _too fucking intimidated._  

“No.” Wooyoung answers for him, and his voice is like ice cream that had been left in the sun for too long, and he tilts his head to the side, and San feels like he should be in trouble at how Wooyoung was so effortlessly acting like it was just him and this guy in a room full of an innumerable amount of alcohol possessed bodies.

He feels like he’s stuck in resin, not even that much to the fact that Wooyoung completely changed his demeanor, but most definitely to the fact that the other guy was here. 

He feels weird, guilty almost. 

But he and Wooyoung were pretending, had always been and had always agreed to keep on faking it. He couldn’t figure out why Wooyoung was so hellbent on having the guy leave, and he thinks that’s why he can’t speak. 

He’s too busy trying to figure him out.

And when he leaves, disappears into the crowd of people with two cups full of now unappealing and gross tasting lukewarm punch, San sighs, feels like ice melting on the sidewalk in June, and as he gets over what just happened, at the conversation he and Wooyoung had and his hand still on his thigh, he can’t help but breathe out  a smirk at the realization that Jung Wooyoung was jealous.

Jealous over some stranger at a college party. 

“What happened to you not caring so much about me?” San discards his can of beer on the wooden floor, shifts his weight on one side so that he was leaning against the back of the couch and facing Wooyoung, the alcohol mixing with his blood and his bones and his soul and his confidence at midnight today. Wooyoung places his arms on the back of the couch, taking up even more space, and San feels himself being pulled into his orbit again. He feels new levels of devious, wanting nothing more than to mess with Wooyoung, has a risky wish of seeing how much he could push him, all because of that one can of beer and two cups of punch.

This party was getting kind of boring anyway.

“Shut up.” Wooyoung looks away, exterior drenched in red and it’s seeping into his skin and he could feel it in his chest, eyes like charcoal as they flick back and forth between people dancing to the cheap-expensive speakers as he tries to get over it.

He’s nearly unbothered, though so irritated that he could act so stupid when it comes to Choi San, and San adds it to the list of hidden talents he has.

“You couldn’t stand the sight of…” his voice skips again, “of someone else after me. Didn’t take you for the jealous type—”

Wooyoung grabs San’s shirt collar and pulls him right to his face, and San’s heart is racing with the fragrant alcohol on his lips. He feels like he’s facing a forest fire, surrounded by danger but he can’t push himself to move. He feels the corner of his mouth lift in a crescent moon smile, his heart picking up within the depressives of the liquor, sparking stars and smoke into him.

He loves the heat.

“Never, will I ever get jealous over you. Get that through. We’re faking everything, and you know that.”

“But do _you?”_

San smirks again, that he made Wooyoung fall silent again as he stares into him for his own answers, feels indifferent to Wooyoung’s tire-track voice as he feels the effects of that punch. 

“Nothing more.” He finally tells him, and San could hear his heart beating in his chest at how the party seemed to fall completely silent, save for the two of them.

“So if I go on that date, you wouldn’t care?”

Wooyoung swallows, glances down at San’s mouth, dark eyes peering back up into his. And San sees it, like he’s got power over Wooyoung. As if it was _him_ being the foreigner in his orbit, like Wooyoung needed permission just to circle him. And the feeling of having Wooyoung in the form of green fire under his palm ignites him in such a way that feels nearly dangerous. 

“He seems actually interested in me, you know. Probably would treat me well. Unlike you, asshat.” San’s lying, he’s lying so bad, but he successfully gets under Wooyoung’s skin in a way that has his eyebrow quirking.

He lets go of San’s collar, lightly pushing him away. San stays close to him, and Wooyoung puts his arm against the back of the couch again, looking at something behind San and finally turning his head in disgust.

“Your boyfriend’s coming back.”

“Okay. I’ll tell him I want that date right now.”

San finds this nearly too amusing.

“You’d better not.”

“I’m gonna do it.” 

And as soon as San is about to turn around, Wooyoung’s hand is at the back of his neck, holding him steady as he kisses him, lips pressed against his in silent panic and he’s shutting his eyes, smiling into it, seeing how easy it was to fuck with him over with something like this.

San kisses him again, and again, and another time, the alcohol in his system altering them into the taste of sweet candy. Wooyoung lightens his grip on San’s neck and places both of his hands on his hips, two fingers lifting up the hem of his shirt and slipping his hand onto the warmed skin. He trails kisses of butterfly wings down to San’s throat as he presses a hand onto his hip, causing goosebumps to scatter his skin like salt, and Wooyoung opens his eyes lightly to look at the strange boy after San, seeing him glance at him awkwardly and keep walking as if he wasn’t there for San at all.

And Wooyoung kind of felt bad. Maybe.

San feels bubbly champagne in his belly and lolls his head back as Wooyoung decorates his throat with sapphire, nearly shaking, as if lightning was his makeup and electricity was his blood. He gets embarrassed, at the fact that there were people walking past them, and instead of pushing Wooyoung away in humiliation, his fingers unconsciously curl in the fabric of his shirt once Wooyoung lingers his lips over a more sensitive area near his jawline, and he wished his insides didn’t explode into everything in him whenever Wooyoung even brushed his fingertips over his skin. 

He should be used to this by now. It seemed like Wooyoung liked to make him explode in front of their friends and these strangers and his mom and nearly everyone these days.

He goes to kiss him again, as if on autopilot, and his mouth moves slowly against the highs of the bass and the lows of the major scales blasting within the music. His lips are wet and soft and it’s beginning to hurt with the way he’s pushing into it, but Wooyoung finds the chase of heavy alcohol and pineapple chapstick addicting, and San didn’t really care to stop, until he couldn’t breathe.

“I hate you,” San whispers, feeling the goosebumps wave over him when Wooyoung’s hands present warmth, like stovetops beneath his palms, over his skin.

Normally, it wouldn’t be a bother for him to maybe kiss him once, but the combination of Jung Wooyoung and his hands _and_ pretty expensive alcohol? _At a party?_

Whew. 

Wooyoung presses another kiss to the underside of San’s jaw, a smirk growing on his lips once he feels San shudder against him, feels his fingers grip his hair even tighter.

“Had to do _something_ before you went on a date with that guy. Then your mom would invite your boyfriend over for dinner _again_ and instead you’d have to bring that dude. Imagine.” Wooyoung’s at his ear now, speaking lowly and San could practically see the smirk on Wooyoung’s face and he kind of gets mad that he was able to break so easily.

Wooyoung’s voice reminds San of polar night, deep and dark and gives him a feeling that he shouldn't be here.

“You’re s-such an ass. He was cool.” San smiles lightly, and he’s really hot, but he blames it on the impressive amount of people fitted into this living room and the increasingly poor ventilation that sweaty, dancing bodies brought.

“Not at cool as me. We just don’t compare,” Wooyoung kisses San’s cheek now, right near his lips, and he feels his dimples crease under his lips as he gets shy, pulling himself back down to Earth and seeing that he was, in fact, in a public setting.

“Ah, st-stop it. There are people around.”

“There’s something with you and alcohol. Sober San would never let that guy flirt with him, he would be too scared and run away to his friends. Sober San wouldn’t be on this couch right now, with me. Sober San would...probably he’d be asleep, or maybe reading like...fuckin’ Harry Potter or something, while his friends were out.”

San giggles, Wooyoung smiles, because San knew that he could see right through him so easily, and Wooyoung just thought San’s laugh was pretty and liked to hear it often.

“That last part isn’t true. I would be at a party with them because Yeosang would go, and your brother and I do everything together.” 

He ignores the fact that he was, frankly, planning on staying in tonight and finishing his novel, but Wooyoung didn’t need to hear that confirmation.

“So how come he didn’t come to this party?”

“He did, you just didn’t listen to him when he said he was coming with Seonghwa. Terrible brother.” San tsks at him, the boy in question coming to mind, and he starts to wonder where Seonghwa and Mingi went.

Wooyoung leans back a bit to look at San, and his lips part in a small grin that brings San back to dandelions, delicate with just the right amount of sunlight radiating from them. He smiles wider when he’s filled with the type of happy he’s been getting used to more recently. 

“I’ve been too busy with you,” Wooyoung brings up a hand to San’s jaw, softly runs his thumb over his cherry bottom lip, and San feels of that same smoke, smiling of sweet black licorice and electric spark in his hands.

“Jung Wooyoung, I never thought I’d have a soft spot for you.”

Wooyoung pulls away from him, completely paused as he looks over his face, at his dark hair and pretty colored eyes and rubicund lips, and he grins, too, but it was small and it was saying something to him, but quite frankly, San was too far gone to catch it and that thought of dandelions had been quickly forgotten. He just wanted to sleep, the fire that Wooyoung lit with his match tip kisses diffused and burnt out. What did he just tell Wooyoung?

He just wanted to sleep.

“San! Wooyoung! Hello!”

San scrambles off of Wooyoung without a second thought, and even with the restraints of alcohol’s ropes and the weight of drunkenness on his shoulders, San glows with humiliation as he sits properly on the cushion next to Wooyoung, who looked unfazed. Legs still spread and taking up space, expression unwavering and aura incredibly cool and taking up _so much space._

He looks back at the voice, the culprit for his heart racing in the way that he absolutely hated, and sees that it is, of course, Yeosang. Wooyoung runs a hand through his hair as San radiates nothing but heat.

“Mingi won beer pong, finally. Let’s go, it’s nearly midnight.”

His best friend is wearing a striped sweater that was a little too big for him, tucked into high waisted jeans and falling over his fingers and San could see his cute patterned socks and he absolutely loved when he dressed like this. He thinks Yeosang looks cute, but he can’t remember if he told him, yet.

“You look cute, best friend!”

“Thank you! Sannie, I love you!” Yeosang gets shy again, in the same boat as San on the compliments, and San smiles because he liked to see Yeosang happier, even for a little bit.

“Why...why do you sound normal?” Wooyoung asks, looking up at his brother, and San finds it funny how they were stark opposites of each other, Wooyoung with his smoked eyeliner and Yeosang with blush the color of carnations dusted onto his cheeks.

“Yunho finally got Joong to drink. Said _I_ have to be the designated driver, like…?” Yeosang rolls his eyes and shakes his head once, “I hate my friends. You guys don’t want me to thrive.”

San rolls his own eyes at that, but he gets up anyway, his legs feeling like clay and his head is swimming (more like drowning, if he was being honest) with the liquor and the strange boy and the Wooyoung. He follows Yeosang to the front door, where Hongjoong and Mingi were laughing nearly too hard at something Yunho was struggling to get out through giggles. San’s hearing goes out, filled with the bumps of the speakers, and he gets disoriented when they walk right past one of them, head pounding to the tempo of the kickdrums. 

He holds on to the end of Wooyoung’s shirt as they move past the crowd blocking the front door, and San finally gets outside, where the cool, clear air was and he basks in the nighttime. He’s still holding onto Wooyoung’s shirt as they begin the walk to Hongjoong’s van, completely blocking out the conversations that Yunho and Mingi were holding, and whatever Hongjoong was still laughing at. Seonghwa had met them outside, and took up walking in front with Yeosang, while Wooyoung stuck back and let San come down, not talking, but sticking with him anyway. 

He suddenly tugs lightly on his shirt.

“Woo…”

Wooyoung stops and turns around quickly, eyebrows raised. He looks swimmy in the moonlight, but Wooyoung already knows what San wants by the way he’s pouting and blinking so much.

“I’m tired.”

“Do you want a ride?” 

San rubs at his eye with the hand that wasn’t holding onto the end of Wooyoung’s shirt, and nods. The concern of him being too heavy for Wooyoung has dissipated, only this once, and Wooyoung smiles while he turns back around for San to get on because he knows how self-conscious he was about his weight.

And as he’s carrying San back to the car, head resting on his shoulder, he can’t help but think back to the party. San was out of his mind, Wooyoung thinks his duality is even more insane. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the other boy. Not the strange one, but the _other_ one. San only mentioned him briefly, but even when he’s nearly at Hongjoong’s van and San had probably forgotten about their conversation, he still feels that pang of irritation in his chest.

Should he have gotten jealous? He kind of feels stupid that he, stone-cold and rock-heart Jung Wooyoung, let a boy that San brought up _once_ get to him. 

His thoughts are like the bustling subways of New York City, specifically at the 6am mark and specifically when there’s only one gate open on a Monday. He wants to find closure, to get something more out of him about that Minhyuk. He’s nearly arguing with himself, because he really didn’t want to bother San with something that wasn’t even a big deal, but he can’t help the feeling swelling in his chest.

He decides to just ask him.

“Hey, San, who’s Minhyuk?”

But by the time the question got past his queue and out of his mouth, San was sleeping peacefully on his shoulder, drool glinting off of his lip (and, unfortunately, off of Wooyoung’s shirt).


	20. hm. nevermind.

“I am gonna  _ kill you!”  _

San bursts into Wooyoung’s room on the Tuesday following the party, and catches him in the act of reading a novel, specs on his nose and in sporty, black sweatpants with white stripes traveling up the sides. It’s been two days since the party, San spending all day yesterday trying to come down from his nasty hangover by periodically chugging down pickle juice and sleeping (also spending the day trying not to throw it all up) in his bedroom and hiding from his mom. Yeosang had been nice enough to come over, and helped him out with everything, but he still feels a beating ache in his temple when he moves his head slightly to the right.

Wooyoung’s eyebrows raise in surprise, San’s outburst breaking the silence of his room, and crashing the world he was in. But he didn’t mind, he’d go back later. The ache in his head was back with every movement he made to follow San through his bedroom, but he remembers that it was San instead of Yeosang or his mom, so he thinks the ache was worth it. 

He thinks it was worth it to look at how beautifully celestial he looked against the highlight of the lemon light shining through the window behind him.

“Sanny! Hi, baby.” He dog-ears the page (to his dismay) and sets it on his nightstand as San hops onto his bed (more like onto his legs), sitting right on his lap and looking at him like he was expecting something from him.

“Wooyoung!” San whines, and Wooyoung can’t help the twitch of the corner of his lips when he hears it, remembers how shy San was when they first met, he would barely open his mouth in front of him to ask for a glass of water.

“Yeosang tells me we did stuff last night.” Wooyoung says, but he quickly sighs internally when he realizes how bad that sounded to an already stressed-out, easily-embarrassed Choi San.

San’s eyes blow wide. “We?  _ You! _ ”

“Me?” Wooyoung’s eyebrows come together, because he really couldn’t remember what all he did, what all he saw and what all he was even wearing. “What did I do?”

Wooyoung vaguely remembers the taste of pineapple chapstick and liquors mixed with cheap juices that had way too much food dye in it. He vaguely remembers the party being very dark, very red, and very humid. He remembers throwing up the salsa he had after taking shots and inhaling something that tasted like how streaky car tires sound.

That was about it.

“I don’t know! I was drunk off my ass! You poisoned me!”

Wooyoung smiles at how ridiculous San was being, rolling his eyes. He opens his arms for San, who sighs, and crawls forward, sitting right on his lap.

“Baby, you had like...a draft beer and one full cup of punch. Granted, it was the strongest juice I’ve ever had, but…” Wooyoung looks at the ceiling and shrugs, “It wasn’t too bad.”

San nods confidently, as if he just understood something important. 

“Poisoned.”

Wooyoung puts his hands on San’s hips, really having no other place to put them, and he smiles.

“San, calm down. I made sure nothing bad happened to you. You just kissed me, is all. I didn’t get you pregnant if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

San colors, hides his shade of strawberry skin in his hands and makes a face behind his palms, Wooyoung’s words resonating in his head way louder than they should have. 

“ _ Wooyoung!  _ You’re doing too much. Way too much.” His voice is muffled as he speaks into his hands and Wooyoung could practically feel the heat coming from his cheeks.

“Oh, shush.” He says, and he pokes San’s cheek, much like Yeosang does when he’s not too interested in the subject at hand, and takes San’s hands away from his face, opting for holding them instead. “We’re pretend-boyfriends, so I have to pretend to be in love with you until next Saturday now, unless I keep reeling in your mom and she invites me over for dinner again. Then you gotta go, there’s only room for miss Choi in my heart.”

San grimaces, unconsciously squeezes Wooyoung’s hand in his. “You’re sick.”

“Yeah, lovesick for your mom.”

“You’re so obnoxious.” San shakes his head, and he really tries hard not to smile at Wooyoung’s stupid antics but he feels his eyes squint up when looking at Wooyoung’s pretty starry eyes and good  _ lord _ , he was too easy.

“Thank you, darling. Compliments from my true love make me rise in the morning, sleep at night. I-”

“Shut up!” San throws his head back, embarrassment still hitched on his shoulders like a winter coat in August, but Wooyoung was very good at changing the subject, and making him blush about something else.

“Okay, but you have to kiss me. Free of charge.”

San shakes his head. “No.”

“Okay, then one dollar.”

“What happened to you not caring about the money?” San tilts his head and slightly furrows his eyebrows, and Wooyoung smooths a thumb over the back of San’s hand, looking over his face, and he knows San is self-conscious and he  _ knows  _ how much he hates it, but Wooyoung can’t help himself.

San was pretty in the morning, and in the afternoon and at night and every twilight and dawn in between.

“Sunny, I’m a college student. This would be charity work.” Wooyoung brings up San’s left hand and presses his lips to his knuckles, and San flushes the hues of pink that he’d see when the sun kisses the moon on her way up in the morning, and looks to the bedsheets, knowing Wooyoung only did that when he wanted something.

“No.”

“Two dollars?”

_ “No.” _

“I’ll go back down to free if you say yes.”

“I’ll give you sixty-six cents and a peppermint instead.”

“Deal. Discount on the sixty-six cents.” Wooyoung smiles brightly, and San finds their conversations getting exceedingly stupid the more he’s around Wooyoung.

He likes talking to him. He likes not really having to worry if something he said was weird, because Wooyoung was even weirder. He likes always laughing, even when he wasn’t feeling it so much.

He likes Wooyoung.

He kisses him this morning for the first time, and it feels of birds flying home for the day, fluttering and airy in his chest, and he takes the peppermint from his back pocket after pulling himself back into reality, reaches over to place it on Wooyoung’s nightstand, but he was a fool and Wooyoung takes this opportunity to flip them over on his bed so that he’s laying on his back, Wooyoung on top of him.

San giggles from the adrenaline, and Wooyoung buries his face in the crook of San’s neck, blowing raspberries on the skin. Goosebumps are like the morning dusk, covering San’s body in a warmth that he hadn’t been familiar with, yet, but he could get used to. Laughing so loud and so prevalently like this only happens…

Hm. Nearly never.

_ “Wooyoung!” _

“Sannie! My baby! Can we go on a date right now and take naps together? That would be good.”

“Wooyoung, please, I have stuff to do today,” San says, almost out of habit, because he really didn’t have anything to do today (unless finishing a novel and playing Undertale for the nth time), but he needed to make up an excuse before he fell into Wooyoung’s trap, otherwise  _ then,  _ he’d be here all day.

“Like what? Play Undertale? Haven’t you replayed it enough times?”

_ Jeez. _

“Wow, you read right through me.” San looks at him, bringing up a hand to his hair and watching the way the dark roots bleed into his fading silver.

“Nap!” 

Wooyoung shuts his eyes as he slides over to San’s side, shifting a couple of times, San moving with the dips of his bed, before he finds himself lying on Wooyoung’s mound of grey and black pillows with Wooyoung’s fading silver and dark root hair against the bundles of black blankets around his legs. He rests his head in his lap, but asks San to get his novel from the bedside table as he curls up slightly. 

“You want to read? I thought you were tired.” San hands it to him, seeing he was nearly done with Lovecraft, and refrains from making a face that obviously showed he hadn’t expected Wooyoung to like him.

“I changed my mind, I wanna finish these last chapters.”

And despite them usually falling into comfortable silences like this was supposed to be, San can’t help but feel strange. He feels like he’s wearing itchy clothing, like he needed to get out. He wanted to squirm, but that would be too weird. Something was weird here. 

He feels stagnant. 

But he pulls out his phone and occupies himself with one of his many useless games he had strewn around within his apps, trying to focus more on his phone rather than the gentle turns of novel pages that sounded like the gusts of a Category 5 in the summertime. He sniffles, just to make noise in this undefined silence, hearing it echo throughout the room and back into him. 

Even more strange, Wooyoung’s been reading that same page for a while now. He was clearly thinking about something other than the book, and San wishes he could go into his head and figure it out. They would have at least been talking about something stupid, like the worst cereal brands or  _ something,  _ but he was silent and his thoughts were nearly too loud for San to keep quiet and—

“Hey, San? You talked about a Minhyuk at the party. Which one?”

There it is. San swallows, feels his heart drop, and there are images of a beautiful boy that San had awed at during class, but that was all. He was good friends with him, he remembers their macro projects and hanging out together a lot, but nothing was ever weird between them, save for the first couple of days.

Minhyuk.

“I did?”

“Yeah. Said he asked you on a date. Did you say yes?”

That question hits him strangely, and San’s made up of forest fire again, thinking, with his heart beating heavily, right behind his eyes and in his throat. Why did he bring up Minhyuk, right now? 

He thinks, remembers his first forgotten question and goes on to answer his second.

“Oh, uh...no. I couldn’t. Just…” San shakes his head, stares into the blankets for thought, because he  _ could have,  _ but didn’t want to, really couldn’t bring himself to say yes, “I couldn’t.”

“Oh.”

Now, this is awkward. 

But Wooyoung really had a knack, just like his brother, for making things less weird, and he shifts himself on San’s lap and continues to read his novel, actively turning the pages (San knows because he listened; Wooyoung was fast), while San continues to play his game on his phone. But his mind wasn’t there, and he was randomly pressing the buttons in his game and he lost a lot quicker than he was capable of, but Wooyoung stops again, stops his world, as he looks up at him.

“San, I changed my mind. I’m pooped.” 

San sighs, still has the lingering thought of why Wooyoung asked him about Minhyuk, but he tries his best to ignore it and opens his arms out for a sleepy Wooyoung. He dog-ears his novel again, sets it on the floor of his room with a loud clap against the tile, and crawls up to lay in between San’s legs, head resting on his tummy, and he hugs the space in between the pillows and San’s back. 

San isn’t used to this, but Wooyoung falls asleep pretty quickly, and he tries not to move or make noise. He opts for playing with Wooyoung’s fading silver hair and running his other hand over his back in circles and made up shapes that he was not taught in elementary school, not really knowing how to lull someone to sleep, but he thinks he did a pretty good job if he was being honest. Wooyoung left him alone with his soft snores and the bustling quiet of his room, alone to think about him and himself only, and how he’s feeling about everything and everyone.

And while he comes to a conclusion, he can’t help but stare at the sleepy boy in his arms.

San thinks that, maybe, he might… 

Hm. 


	21. hurts to hear, huh?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gus dapperton pls dont sue me for using lyrics as titles i love u

It’s been two more months. 

San’s mom stopped asking about him, save for the few _how’s Wooyoung?_ every so often. They still have dinner on Sundays, but not every weekend, it was more like once a month. San thinks of it as a break, feels less stressed, like he _needs_ to do something, rather than a want. 

He hopes Wooyoung feels the same.

And in that time that San wasn’t stressing about his mom, he was talking to that same Minhyuk, from his macro class. They’ve spent a lot of time together, being paired for yet another macro project, but San can’t help but feel terrible whenever he was around him. He’d asked to stay friends a while ago, and Minhyuk had gladly agreed, but being around him somehow made San feel...guilty. 

He was your average perfect person. Very smart, made San laugh a lot, always made sure he was okay and went out of his way to talk to him. And San thought that anyone would fall for Minhyuk, that it would be easy and he would finally have a real boyfriend for himself.

Turns out, it was hard for him to fall for Minhyuk, because he was already on his way down for somebody else. But San blames it on Minhyuk’s habit of laughing too loud (and he really _didn’t_ laugh too loud, but San had to find something, _anything_ for justification and he was going to stop at nothing).

San never brought it up to Wooyoung after that Tuesday, and Wooyoung’s never asked about it again. He never asked, not even when he’s sleeping in his bed or wakes up with him or goes to get breakfast with him in the afternoon. He really liked spending time with Wooyoung, and even when he would hang out with Minhyuk, he couldn’t help but picture Wooyoung’s pretty smile, or his harp string laugh or the way his dark eyebrows would quirk whenever San was talking about something he enjoyed.

But he forgets about it.

It was Friday afternoon today, the rain was sprinkling over the Earth and perfumed her with petrichor, and the sky was getting angrier by the minute, plaguing the house with rattling thunders and fireworks of electric flashes of lightning.

Wooyoung has been thinking nearly too much lately, in his room and in class and in the kitchen when he’s making a bowl of cereal, creating yet another world from Choi San’s novels with only him in it, but wanting so desperately to stop. He knows everything was pretend, but in this world, this paradise that he finds himself always adding to, with San and his beautiful smiles of sun rays, everything was real to him. And it made him angry that he couldn’t live in his sunshine world and was instead walking through the rain while the clouds suffocated the sky with grey hands and booming screams, and he was getting worse by the second. 

He kind of hated it, how easily San made him fall like this. How easy it was for him to crave his presence and touches and kisses and conversations that sparked from nothing, yet ignited everything in him. He kind of hated how he felt weird around him, how San would break down his confidence to where he was nothing but the brightest glow of vulnerability in front of him, and he kind of hated how open he felt around him, when all he did was close off to people.

He kind of hated San.

And he gets even angrier, because he can’t tell him that without him not understanding. This was new, this whole _feelings_ thing, but it was all for show, and he really wished it wasn’t, but he can’t _say that_ without San not understanding. He was trapped within himself, and he wanted to end it before it gets worse. 

Before he spirals into a mess of wants and stupidity on his way down.

He opens the door with shaky hands and numb fingertips, blowing out a breath and feeling the dripping rain skip off of his chin and onto the doormat. He makes eye contact with Seonghwa from the kitchen, cooking something for who he assumed was Yeosang and the rest of them that he assumed where in the living room by the volume of the cartoons playing. Seonghwa gives him a smile, which was returned with a grimace as he turns to shut the door, and he kind of feels bad because he wasn’t pissed at Seonghwa, but at the same time, he was, and he was pissed at Yunho and Mingi and Jongho and Hongjoong and Yeosang and everybody that was breathing right now.

He wanted to be alone today, maybe tomorrow, too.

It’s only when he looks at San himself, walking through the opening of the kitchen with a tiny smile on his face, that he feels something inside him plummet, like when the rope breaks for the well bucket, and he’s hit the ground, hard. He can’t understand, can’t grip around why he’s suddenly so angry at him. He would usually greet him in some way, but he can’t help but walk past him, hearing him ask about his day, oblivious and so happy to be around him.

And for the first time in a while, Wooyoung wants to cry.

“Stop doing that.” His voice is low, and his eyes remind San of Alexander’s Band, the darkness between the otherwise dainty and bright reds and oranges of hope.

It hurts Wooyoung how quickly San stopped, how quickly he halted because he’s never acted this way with him, but he keeps walking. He feels like he’s trying to walk through a wall of plastic wrap, but it’s too hard and he’s suffocating.

“Are you okay?”

Wooyoung doesn’t respond, and keeps walking up the stairs, San following after him cautiously. His footsteps following far behind him were heavy steps with a military boot, weighted and unrelenting, stepping on him, trampling nearly.

“Hey, if there’s something wrong, please talk to me. Maybe I can he-”

“You can’t help, San. Just leave me alone, please.”

So San does. He stays on the second stair, his heart beating wildly in his chest as he looks up at Wooyoung walking away. He wants to know what’s going on to try and help him, but, he should know. 

Wooyoung doesn’t like to talk about things.

There’s a crack in his dam knowing that he was probably angry at him for something. San goes through the files in his head, about that one time he accidentally spilled caramel ice cream on his pants at the park. But Wooyoung laughed it off and kissed him for it instead of getting mad at him. Or maybe the other time, when San forgot to bring Wooyoung’s wallet with him out on a date. But even then, Wooyoung laughed it off again and insisted on paying San back for dinner.

Wooyoung never really got angry at him.

“Wooyoung-”

That final push drove Wooyoung to break.

“And while you’re at it, stay home. I’m ending this. Whatever we have going on. Stay home, tell your mom we broke up, whatever the fuck.” His voice is like a grater, scrubbing against San’s sensitive skin. “We’re done.” 

The air left him, and San feels his dam crumble, the storm’s flood broke out into his chest. There was a huge crack in the walls he had let down just a bit, but they were damaged and he feels as if he’s suffocating underwater. He feels the salt of the Dead Sea over his head again, coldness so quick and so foreign as he spent all this time floating along with it, basking in the sunlight. He’s sinking once Wooyoung stares at him with that same expression of shadows, and humility is creeping up his neck and strangling him like plastic waste. 

“Y-you don’t mean that. Talk to m-”

“Did you hear what I said? Fuck off. Just... _leave me alone. Fuck_.”

Wooyoung leaves, so _fucking_ angry, and San is by himself, again, stuck on the second step and gripping the railing with clammed hands. Grey matter is what makes up his head, mud in his chest and the rain in his throat. His eyes are cloudy, bedimmed with rejection yet again, and he feels warmth rolling down his cheeks, painting clear trails down warmed skin as he stares up at the empty hallway, trying to make sense of him.

It’s suffocating in here. He needs to leave.

San turns around, sees Seonghwa standing there with a bowl in his hand, Mingi and Yunho and Jongho and Hongjoong looking at him with looks of - he doesn’t know, but he refuses to think they’re of sympathy - and exits the house quickly, not bothering to close the door behind him, meeting the familiar sting of rain as he steps off of the porch. The storm picked up outside, and normally San would stay inside, with all this loud thunder, but he runs home, runs from the memories of when he thought that nothing could ever happen to him in the time-stop of Wooyoung’s bedroom, and into the shattered glass of the fact that he was wrong. 

He was so fucking wrong and he’s mad at himself for being so stupid.

He opens his front door, not bothering to lock it when he left since he lived right next door, teeth clenched as he tries not to break yet, tries to hold himself together because _he didn’t mean it._ It’s hard, he feels like he could fall any second and his eyes were stinging with the rain and he didn’t know if his chest could cave any further, but he _didn’t mean it._

He’s drenched on the way into his bedroom, feels himself get angrier with the storm. He screams as the thunder shouts, tugs at his hair with his lightning strike fingers as he rains. He rains, everything in him was storming, and he can’t help but feel like he’s drowning in himself.

Drowning, drowning.

San sinks to the floor as the thunders die down, as he dies down, and cries into his hands, brings his knees up to his chest because he was sizzling in the open air. He hasn’t done this in a while.

He’s hurting.

And he thinks back to all the times when he was with Wooyoung, all the facades in front of his mom and his friends. He knew it would come to an end soon, but _god,_ not like that. 

 _Never_ like that. 

And he grips his hair with his fingers because he was fucking dumb for thinking that this would work out. He grips his hair because he was so mad at Wooyoung for pulling him on when he knew that he was going to call it quits. He grips his hair harshly; he was sad because he was left alone to cry this hard by himself with no one to make him forget again. Fucking Jung Wooyoung and his stupid self and this stupid break up.

They make a pretty good team, huh?


	22. yeosang

San hadn’t left his bed yet. 

It was nearly five in the afternoon and San hadn’t gotten up to eat, only left the comfort of his bed to use the bathroom. Maybe. He forgot. His stomach felt like it was filled with stones, heavy, jagged rocks that would shift whenever he moved. So he didn’t. His mom had come up to check on him, and he told her that he was just feeling blue for today, that it would pass, and she understood, but at the same time, had no idea. San doesn’t know if it would pass, he thinks he had a rain cloud over his head and it would be here for a while. 

And it was then that he started to think that being alone wouldn’t help so much.

He looks at his window, eyes feeling like driftwood as he turns his heavy head to think. He really didn’t want to be alone, but at the same time, didn’t want to deal with telling him anything, either. He was scared, but he thinks he needs to do it.

He knows he needs to do it.

He reaches over to where his phone was set on the charger, face down on his nightstand, and it feels like cold frostbite against his warm skin, and he grabs it, presses the contact name and remembers the time his contact photo was taken.

He can’t smile, but he wants to. It’s like the sun was trying to peek behind the clouds. He presses the phone to his ear and hears the dial tones, each one a silver needle into his head.

_Hello? San? I was just about to call you._

He’s scared. He doesn’t know why, but he feels so _scared_ , like Yeosang was dark matter and the more he spoke, the more San wanted to break down, disappear, and he was scared that he’d get mad at him, but...

For what?

_What the hell did you do to my broth—_

“I need you.”

San’s voice cracks, and Yeosang is quiet for a moment. He sighs, and San’s gripping the phone, shaking as he struggles to keep himself from flooding yet again, and Yeosang sighs again. He’s waiting, waiting, waiting. San feels slightly better when he hears what he assumes was Yeosang getting up from his beanbag chair.

_Okay. I’m coming through the window._

San shuts his eyes in relief, a tear marking his cheek and sliding uncomfortably down his temple onto the shell of his ear, and he takes it as another mark of weakness over him. He hangs up the phone and lets his hand fall onto his mattress, heat filling up his temples and rain stirring in his heart, as he hears the window open, shout back at him. 

He sits up, and is met with his best friend standing there, arms crossed in a manner that told him he needed to talk to him, but wanted to listen. And San knows that even if he didn’t speak, Yeosang would listen. His jumper is very blue, reminds San of the crystal cerulean seas that he would only dream of floating on, basking in the warm wave of the afternoon sun. Yeosang feels like a ghost here, doesn’t know why or how but he feels incomplete when he’s standing here and looking at San.

“Talk to me.”

San can’t look at him, instead, he opts for staring at his window, where he would watch the moon sing to him at night when he was bored.

“I think…we…” He hates how he has so much trouble with this, words tasting like lemon rinds on his tongue. “We broke up.”

“You broke up? Like,” Yeosang takes it upon himself to crawl onto San’s mattress, silently speaking to him and seeing his eyes and his lips and his skin and his hair, and throws the blanket over him, lying down with him and staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it, “fake broke up?”

It was then that it hits him again. This whole thing was for show, right? So why did it hurt him so badly? Why did it spiral out of control like that? What did he do wrong?

“I don’t know. I guess.” San shrugs, and breaths in through his nose, shakily and timidly but he doesn’t know what to be wary about right now.

“I don’t think he thought the same. He was literally crying in his bedroom today. I’ve never seen my brother cry, San. What happened?”

“He came home mad. And then he broke up with me. F-fake broke up, I guess. I don’t know.” San sighs again, brings his hands up to tug at his hair. Maybe if he tugged hard enough he’d tear out his frustrations. “This whole thing was a… _fucking_ mistake. And we knew this would happen, too. Idiot, I’m the world’s biggest fucking id-”

“Hey.” 

Yeosang’s soft voice was like the drop of white into a pool of pitch-black ink, and San runs a hand through his black hair, through his stressed thoughts that tangled like webs and he was the lone fly, trapped and weaving himself further the more he tried. But tried for what?

Everything would come back to Wooyoung.

And when San stops speaking, Yeosang suddenly softens. He knew that San was once again vulnerable, to the biggest extent, because San didn’t cry much in front of him, or anyone, really. But Yeosang looks at him, tilts his head and there’s that same flower petal smile that’s on his face. He turns his head to him, sees San’s glossy eyes as they stare up at the ceiling, flicking back and forth through his file cabinet head.

“It’s okay to cry, Sannie. I’m here for you, best friend.”

San broke again, cried into his hands _again_ , this time, hiding from the world as he turns into Yeosang’s blue jumper. He doesn’t say anything, just lays with him, let him cry and his presence soaks up the storms that Uganda could never top. Yeosang feels terrible — like a disease, San gets into him, and he holds San close to him as his shoulders shake, threaten to shake him off into the ashes of the dead sky, and listens to his sniffles and silent screams towards his brother while his eyes threatened to pour with him.

He calms a bit after what seemed like eons, warm tears seeping into Yeosang’s clothes and his skin and his heart, and he runs a hand through San’s black hair, thinking of that happy memory to try and combat what was happening now.

“I love you. Even if you feel like nobody else does, I’ll always love you no matter what. You’re my very best friend. I really don’t understand what happened but,” Yeosang hugs him tighter, “I love you, okay?”

San cries even harder, feels his nose clog and his throat skip and he cries so _fucking_ hard into Yeosang’s chest. His voice feels weak, but he tries, clutching Yeosang’s jumper and hiding away into the spaces of him. He nods, because he knows. And somehow, it doesn’t make him feel any better, but he really knows. 

“Okay.”


	23. tthwy tucking tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is so dramatic i'm sCREAMING why did nobody tell me!

**gigi:** _ :( _

**hwa:** _ Sannie pls talk to us _

**jongho:** _ yea pls :( i love u _

**joong:** _ hey if u dont it’s okay! _

**joong:** _ we heart u  _

**yunho:** _ i love you sannie!!! _

**_im sorry_ **

**_hi_ **

**_i am okay!_ **

**yeo:** _ dont lie _

**hwa:** _ Yeosang!!! _

**_it hurts_ **

**_a lot_ **

**_idk why_ **

**_but it hurts a lot_ **

**_this was all for show_ **

**_but it hurts_ **

**jongho:** _ i’m sorry san _

**gigi:** _ okay real talk u know what i don’t get?? _

**hwa:** _ I’m not gonna say it’s okay because it’s really not, but! We’re here for you if you wanna talk!! Always!! _

**joong:** _ what hwa said!! fuck wooyoung _

**yeo:** _ thats my bro!! _

**yeo:** _ but yea fuck woo _

**_noooo don’t say that_ **

**_i think something is going on with him_ **

**gigi:** _ why did he get so mad?? why was he so angry to break it off with you?? _

**hwa:** _ Okay well if we want to have a real talk, _

**hwa:** _ It was literally so obvious he was into San for real. _

**yeo:** _ yea that is true _

**gigi:** _ well yeah wbk but _

**gigi:** _ was it really thay serious ma! _

**jongho:** _ wait wait wait _

**jongho:** _ do yall seriously dont know whats going on here _

**jongho:** _ wooyoung was literally catching feelings _

**yunho:** _ im hearing sumn _

**yunho:** _ and san was the first boy right???  _

**yunho:** _ wooyoung bi but doesnt wanna admit it _

**joong:** _ u guys are unbelievable  _

**joong:** _ maybe he just got tired of fake dating and wanted to date real people _

**joong:** _ not everyone is gay!! _

**joong:** _ what do u think this is?? fanfiction???? lmao _

**yeo:** _ joong might be right _

**yeo:** _ my brother is fucking weird when it comes to feelings and stuff _

**yeo:** _ i literally cant read him rn _

**hwa:** _ I think San should talk to him. _

**_what_ **

**_no_ **

**_nobononobo_ **

**_never_ **

**_not talking to him again_ **

**hwa:** _ San you can’t hide from him forever. _

**yunho:** _ hwa i dont think thats a good idea _

**hwa:** _ Why? _

**jongho:** _ theyre broken up _

**jongho:** _ they are now fake exes _

**_yea he broke up w me_ **

**_fake broke up_ **

**_he clearly doesnt want me around anymore_ **

**_so_ **

**_talking_ **

**_not a good idea_ **

**hwa:** _ All I’m saying is that he was clearly catching feelings and doesn’t know how to approach them _

**yeo:** _ but thats not san’s problem! he bREATHED and wooyoung said “>:|” _

**gigi:** _ plus talk to him about what? they were never really dating _

**gigi:** _ u see why this was a bad idea? _

**yunho:** _ so youre saying this is san’s fault??? _

**jongho:** _ its no ones fault _

**hwa:** _ Yes and no _

**hwa:** _ They both really didn’t do anything wrong _

**hwa:** _ But someone should have broken it up sooner _

**hwa:** _ When it showed that this was something different _

**_he’s never told me he liked me like that_ **

**_how was i supposed to know!!_ **

**_this is jung wooyoung we’re talking about_ **

**jongho:** _ maybe it’s that minhyuk _

**joong:** _ bruh u told him about minhyuk????? _

**_well yea_ **

**_why wouldnt i_ **

**_he brought him up again once and i told him i couldnt say yes to him_ **

**_about the dates and everything_ **

**_i couldnt say yes_ **

**gigi:** _ and why do u think u couldnt say yes _

**gigi:** _ because youre fucking in love w him dummy _

**gigi:** _ and thats why this sucks so much for u _

**_gi i hate u_ **

**gigi:** _ i’m righttttt _

**jongho:** _ san we are here for u if u wanna talk _

**yeo:** _ nah fuck that me and hwa are coming over _

**yunho:** _ ooo are we having a party!! _

**jongho:** _ me and yunho are coming too! _

**jongho:** _ if we can :) _

**_yes pls i hate being alone rn_ **

**_im sorry for being over dramatic_ **

**_i love u guys_ **

**_really_ **

**_a lot_ **

**yeo:** _ dramatic my dick u literally never shout at anyone and barely talk outside of our friend group _

**gigi:** _ did he just call himself overdramatic _

**joong:** _ imagine being san and thinking youre being over dramatic when ur whole ass heart is broken _

**jongho:** _ imagine being san _

**yunho:** _ yea fr _

**gigi:** _ with his NON OVER DRAMATIC ASS _

**joong:** _ san we love u we will see u soon _

**yeo:** _ me and hwa will come over on the tree _

**_aw man_ **

**_tthwy tucking tree_ **

(And San cries for the second time that day.)


	24. why'd you leave me like that?

San nearly trips over a bundle of the clothes he wore yesterday on the way back up to his room, has every thought of everyone in the world swirling through his rain cloud head, full and heavy and he just wanted to go back to sleep. 

It’s raining again today, except the sky was still trying to smile as she cried on the Earth. The sun was beating down on the wet streets and grass, sidewalk like a silver mirror against the water and heat of the sun that San can’t help but lose himself in his thoughts when he goes to his watching window. He feels dirty, _gross_ , that Wooyoung was right next door, only a tree away, and that he could have been with him today and wasting away such a weird day together, but instead, he’s by himself in his house and he’s got nothing to do but think. He kind of hated it.

He kind of hated Wooyoung, too.

Wooyoung. He hasn’t talked to him in days, but it feels like lightyears on Earth when he thinks about it. It still felt like he was stepping on his heart with spiked military boots when he thinks about it. It still feels like he meant nothing to anyone when he thinks about it. He really hated thinking about it. 

He really hated Wooyoung.

It feels as if he had put his heart out on the table, unlocked his chest and let everything spill out. Now it’s missing, empty cages with no butterflies in it. Or maybe all of his butterflies had their wings clipped, and no matter how hard they tried to fly, to fill the cage with pretty whispers of fluttering wings and the songs of hope, they couldn’t. If he were to press his hand to his chest, he knows it would sink into his skin and his soul, but he doesn’t try it.

His chest was empty.

And San really knows why he’s taking everything so personally. He feels like he’s been writing a book, his own personal memoir, maybe, and he ran out of pen ink when he was getting to a really good part. And it’s like he’s been trying to write, trying to emphasize ideas and thoughts that weren’t visible, but he wanted so desperately for it to be there.

He wanted Wooyoung to be there.

He’s staring out of the window, as the rain showers lightly against the hot streets, at the blooming cherry blossoms that sprouted on the trees scattered across the cul-de-sac from their houses, watches the way the pink syrup bleeds into the otherwise pure, white petals. He sees one ruffling in the wind, a pinch away from being carried out from the hands of the grass blades.

And when it finally does, when the wind finally picks it up and Gravity wants company, he can’t stop looking at it. 

It’s true - he thinks that cherry blossoms do fall about 5 centimeters per second, because he counted as it falls into the grass. His cheeks are syrup pink in a matter of seconds when he remembers him, and his cherry blossom heart fell to the all too hard ground, fell into reality when his entire world was slowed by a dream, and he can’t get back up. A gust of wind hits the trees, and more blossoms fall in flurries, like pink snow, and San’s staring at the petals gently being caressed by the striking, soft grass blades, and it was then when he truly realizes how frail he had been with him.

How _stupid_ he had been with him.

He doesn’t think he did enough for them. Maybe there was something that could have been done. Maybe San could have just been better. Maybe this really was his fault.

Maybe this really was over.

And as he stares, he feels as if he had been one of them, one of the soft cherry blossoms that had been attached to the trees, and finally let go. He thinks that he was one of them, his heart plummeting at 5 centimeters per second, but he doesn’t regret any of the time spent blowing in the wind with him. He doesn’t regret breezing through his time-stop world and dreaming away with him.

He doesn’t regret it.

As he stares at the cherry blossoms, he thinks that he would fall for him 5 times over if he could; again, and again, and again, and again, and again.


	25. worth your ear, huh?

It was storming outside again. 

This time, the sky was sick, violent with lightning and it whined of shattering thunders. The clouds were invasive today, uncomfortably set over their neighborhood as they suffocated the sky with their ashy hands. He was home alone, but San doesn’t stare out of his window today. 

He needed to shower.

San trudges to the bathroom after spending a while trying to get out of bed, as if his legs were made of straw and he was carrying stones on his back. He was home alone, didn’t bother to close the door behind him, and he turns on the water, listens to the waterfall faucet as he waits for it to warm. He takes in the tile on the walls and the pretty decorations he put over the toilet and the stone sink on the counter, feeling himself think back to a few days ago and how bad he wanted to get out of here and do something distracting.

And with that, as his eyes wander around his bathroom, he looked in the mirror for the first time in three days.

He stares at his brown eyes that were the color of disappointment and the bags under them that carried the weight of no sleep. He’s been thinking way too much, and it showed in the creases that formed around his tired eyes. His black hair was a mess and his skin was paler and _god,_ it really did look like he was going through a breakup. And it’s stale when San remembers that it wasn’t a _real_ break up. 

You can’t do that with someone you were never dating, to begin with.

...

Jung Wooyoung was in very bad shape. 

His heart was in his throat as he opened his bedroom door today, clad in black sweats and a matching shirt (maybe a shade darker). He had been thinking for the past three days, thinking nonstop about him and San and everything in between. He didn’t know where he was going, but he let his legs carry him out of his hallway. 

He barely remembers leaving his bedroom, but he lets himself be carried down the stairs.

Yeosang sees him from where he is in the kitchen, stuffing soggy cereal into his mouth, milk dripping from his lip into his red ceramic bowl as he looks at Wooyoung, trying to read him. He makes a face when he sees him put on beat-up sneakers, the ones he’s had since he was in high school.

“Where are you going? You know it’s raining outside, right?”

“I need to go see him.” Wooyoung pushes up his circular specs up his nose bridge as he glances at him, hoping Yeosang wouldn’t stop him as he opens the door.

Yeosang stops, disregarding his mouthful of cereal and staring at his brother, not even stopping in his tracks as he leaves the house without a second thought, letting the harsh and humid air of the storm in.

Yeosang blinks, stares at the wood of the closed door, and goes back to eating his cereal. He never questioned it, but he knew what was happening and good _god,_ if he wasn’t nervous. 

He was nervous for him.

And Wooyoung was walking, as if on autopilot, ignoring the thunder that shook his bones and the rain that felt like pinches to his arms as it soaks into his clothes, sticking to him like a second skin.

But he stops within his mission, about halfway there, and he’s looking into the murky puddles at his feet near the sidewalk, trying to think. He doesn’t really know what to expect. He never really knew what to expect with Choi San, but he needed to see him again. He didn’t plan for this, he was just in bed a couple of minutes ago, but it was like an itch in his blood that caught in his veins and ran through his body and he couldn’t get to it.

It’s been bothering him for days. But he thinks that maybe, he should turn around. 

So he does. 

Regrets are beating down on him all the same, but he goes right back inside of his house through the rain, practically hearing his brother call him an idiot when he gets back upstairs and shuts his door.

He can’t. Maybe he really can’t.

...

San finishes his shower when the water turns cold, opts for getting out rather than freezing. He dries himself as best as he could in the humidity of the bathroom, waiting for the vents to air it out before changing back into the clothes he’d woken up in. And his hair is wet and his shoulders were too but he thinks it’s fine, he fits right in with the world and he somewhat found comfort in it.

He’s about to go back into his room, but he stops again, looking out of his window from the hallway that he uses to watch the world and thinks. He’d go back into his room, but for what? To cry? To sleep and miss the sunset today? 

San has never really been in the rain before, willingly. He’s never had the opportunity to stay out in the rain, to melt with the sky and fall into the puddles of the swampy lawn, or frown with the clouds and blink with the stars. He’s never had the rain fall right into his hands, right into his skin and right into his soul, filling him with the thoughts of Earth’s saddest cycle.

So he goes out, steps right outside of his house and onto the sidewalk where the puddles were forming, with his oversized sweater and fuzzy ankle socks with sharks on it and his boxers. He normally wouldn’t be caught dead out here, in the thunder and lightning, but he feels just as vast and just as hollow as the rain today, so he didn’t mind. His neighborhood was quiet, he didn’t have to worry about being made fun of. 

He didn’t have to worry in the rain.

And as he gets used to it, the cold sting of the rain on his warming skin and dripping down his hair and seeping into his clothes on the sidewalk, he shuts his eyes, facing the direction of the rain. He feels so free, even with the lightning behind him and the dynamite thunder above his head. As the rain applauds around him and floods over him, he hears something soft, almost breaking up his pretty, stormy world in his head. It almost sounded like—

“San?” 

His voice is barely audible, and if San was thinking, he would have run back into the safety of his home. But he hears him, opens his eyes and looks back at the real world, and he wants to cry again, fall to his knees and hide away. 

He regretted even getting out of the shower.

Woo is there, silver hair flattened on his forehead and his eyelashes holding rain like dewdrops on the morning grass. He’s staring at him, eyebrows raised and cheeks of Jonagold and San has never seen Wooyoung look so worried before. He starts to think that maybe he had a certain effect on him, too.

He walks forward a little, San not knowing what he was going to do, both stuck in the jello cup awkward again, and San feels like embers in the rain, being put out no matter how hard he tried to burn. He’s lost in his head, as he looks at Wooyoung’s pretty shaped eyes and blooming flower nose and starshine lips. He’s lost in all the emotions he’s been trying to keep down for the past few days, he’s lost in the memories of his bedroom and the places that meant something special to him around town. He’s lost in the words he wanted to tell him and he’s lost in all the things he wanted to hit him with.

He’s lost.

Wooyoung steps closer to him, and San doesn’t realize how close he is until he tries to touch him, reaches out to bring him back to reality. It’s like San would melt if Wooyoung’s fingers even brushed over his skin. San pushes him away, feeling everything come rushing back and he’s trying to push that away, too. He’s getting angry again, feels that same flood in his chest, and his eyes are warm and his lip is trembling and he wants to hide from him because he hated crying in front of people.

Wooyoung must have been one of the few exceptions.

“San-”

“No, _fuck you!_ I don’t want to see you.” San shakes his head, doesn’t even try to look him in the face because he knows he won’t last like this.

“San-”

“What the fuck is wrong with you? In front of our friends?”

Wooyoung sees him, eyes made of glass and nose the color of laceleaf. He thinks he’s terrible, making San cry like this. The dimpled smile he’s come to love was replaced with clenched teeth and a curling frown, and _god,_ he hated to know he was the cause.

“San-”

“I fucking _hate_ you.” San can’t stop, he’s spiraling again and he doesn’t know how to land. “You knew what you were doing and you _knew_ what I was thinking and you knew about everything, and yet you _still_ screwed me over! Do you know how many times I cried over you?” San feels so ridiculous and he wished he could just _stop,_ but he can’t. “I fucking hate-”

Lips.

Like the sun had finally come out in Barrow on the Winter Solstice. His body is breaking once Wooyoung snakes his arms around his waist, antimatter once he squeezes as if Yearning was his first name and Deprivation was his middle. He’s leaning into it, pushing all of his empty days into the way his lips dragged heavy across his mouth. They were like subsuns in a grey sky, San’s melting and everything he hasn’t said, Wooyoung is listening to. 

Everything is rushing back to him so fast.

He touches him, drags sensitive fingertips over his throat to hold his cheek, and he’s pulling out a heat that radiated from within his bones and under his skin, and San was an incandescence of beautiful golds and silvers and bronzes and everything in-between as Wooyoung kisses him. He pulls back a little, but kisses San again as if he would lose him if he didn’t.

“-with you.”

San stops, and he opens his eyes and stares at him and his heart has crashed into a glacier and is sinking in the freezing seas because Jung Wooyoung did _not_ just say what San thinks he heard. 

He did not just say that.

“Wh-what?”

“I’m in love with you, San.”

If he hadn’t felt like he’d been shot before, he definitely feels it now, 12 gauge shells in his chest and throat and head and stomach and everything is happening _too fucking fast_. He can’t speak, mouth full of metal. He looks at Wooyoung, sees that the rain was coming straight from the pools in his eyes, sees that the lightning was behind his eyes and the clouds were in his heart. 

San sees that Wooyoung felt horrible, too, maybe even worse. 

“I broke things off because I knew where it was going for me. A-and I thought it would help, because _this?_ This whole fake dating thing, it…” Wooyoung looks to the sidewalk and swallows, voice like a wool sweater. “There isn’t a day I’m not thinking about you. I’m sorry, San _._ I’m a fucking idiot. I don’t know why I got so mad, I…” Wooyoung shakes his head, looks at the ground, “I don’t care if you think it’s too early, I don’t care if you don’t feel the same or if you’ve moved on to that other _fucking_ guy, _I don’t care_. I am in love with you, Sunny. I love you.” 

Wooyoung’s eyes were wet and the rain was loud against them and San’s heart was exploding as he catches Wooyoung’s lips again, arms finding purchase around his throat and he felt like he really needed this.

This one was even more different. 

San and Wooyoung had jumped. Wooyoung held his hand and they were free with the sky as they jumped off the end of the cliff after their woods. And San basks in the sunlight poking through the trees, basks in the way Wooyoung was leading him through a world in which time stopped, basks in the way he was loving him, and anticipates the plunge with him. 

Wooyoung leans into San, curving his body against his own as he chases the feelings that his heart’s been fighting with for the past few days. He knows it was stupid, but he feels of feathers and white clouds and everything light and airy and beautiful in the world when he kisses Choi San today. He brings his hands up to his face, Wooyoung’s clothes seeping water into San’s grey sweater, but he ignores it, following after the press of his mouth.

San pulls back first, resting his forehead against his with his eyes shut, keeping them closed as he revels in him. Wooyoung can't help the twitch of a smile that breaks his features, grinning against San’s lips as the two stay wrapped within each other, standing in the middle of the sidewalk while it storms outside.

“I’m going to try to be better for you. I promise. I want to be with you for real. Is that okay?”

San smiles, dimples and all. He’s being pulled yet again, so strongly this time, kissing him once, before he nods softly, shyly when he hears that. Jung Wooyoung is in love with him, and he feels his sun rise, despite the weather that the two were trapped in. He feels of embers again.

Jung Wooyoung is in love with him.

“Okay.”


	26. okay.

It’s a morning in December.

San and Wooyoung liked to hang out in their bedrooms in the morning nowadays, because of how pretty and cold outside was and San found so much beauty in the sky during the heart of winter. He’d woken up not even an hour ago, already having conversations with Wooyoung as he sat on his lap, caffeine in the form of Wooyoung’s windchime laugh and crystal smile. And Wooyoung thought San looked heavenly against the white porcelain sunlight singing through his window, and he looked even prettier broken down to one of his oversized pajama shirts and bedhead and no makeup on.

He’s sat on Wooyoung’s hips as he lied underneath him, hands interlaced and he’s moving them in figure eights as they spoke. But it was weird, how San hasn’t said anything yet, and they were in silence for a minute as San looks down at him.

He was thinking, and Wooyoung knew that, so he was quiet for him until he spoke up.

“I don’t deserve you.” 

San says it, more to himself, and Wooyoung’s staring at him, as if he was lost, and San remembers once that Wooyoung told him he sees the stars in his eyes when he first wakes up in the morning and he thinks that maybe he’s looking at Cygni.

That comment makes him feel like honey.

“You’re right.” Wooyoung nods, bringing San’s hand down to his lips and pressing a kiss to his knuckles, and he’s looking at him with something so distinct in his face but San doesn’t know what to think of it. “You deserve somebody so much better, but I’m gonna do everything I can to be the best.”

Better. Better, best.

San doesn’t know how Wooyoung even managed to say something like that. But it makes him heat up, lightbugs in the form of flattery and shyness, glowing in his chest, and he squeezes Wooyoung’s hand a little bit more.

“You really…”

Wooyoung’s eyes flick back and forth between his own, and San can’t think of words to say to let Wooyoung know how much of a statement that was. He can’t put into words how much Wooyoung’s made him feel like somebody, like  _ something,  _ how Wooyoung’s helped him not only love his mom, but love himself, how Wooyoung’s made his days better and his nights darker, how he’s made his heart open from his half-painted walls and how he’s made him smile of sun rays when he was cloudy.

How happy he’s made him.

He leans down, kisses Wooyoung’s lips like rose petals, finds comfort in the way he’s moving his mouth, in the way he’s holding onto him, how he’s silently talking to him. Silently letting him know, too.

He’s good like that.

And San pulls away slightly, rests his forehead on Wooyoung’s warmed skin and ghosts his lips over his, their bubble built up and surrounding them like a glass fortress. Wooyoung brings his free hand up from San’s waist to his face, always finding preference in touching vulnerable parts of him that he knew he hated, fingers brushing over the shape of the dimple indenting his cheek as Wooyoung brought him to smiles. And in that moment of silence, save for the hum of the champagne pouring through Wooyoung’s singular window and the steady beats of his kick drum heart, San feels—

_ “San!”  _

San pulls away, dreamy and frightened, Wooyoung’s voice like lightning and thunder and angry rainwash in the morning, and he sits up, looking over Wooyoung, thinking he was hurt or there was an emergency or  _ something. _

“What? What?”

And his heart’s in his throat and he can’t breathe because he really did get scared easily, and he sees Wooyoung’s mouth move but he can’t decipher what he said.

“What?” 

Wooyoung softens, smiles like peanuts on top of sundae cones, like treasure troves at the bottom of the sea.

“I said that I love you.”

And San smiles, breathes out a sigh through his nose and shakes his head because Wooyoung really was obnoxious.

But this time, he knows it’s not pretend. And he told himself that he didn’t mind the fall, either. When soft lips are on his, for the second time this morning, he lets himself go, lets the wind take him and his glass and his cherry blossoms and sweep him into the mouth of the sea, into the pulls of his orbit, into the welcoming hands of grass blades. Because Wooyooung was different. He was everything San had wanted, but yet, hadn’t been looking for, like serendipity in the picture of silver hair and chandelier laughter. Jung Wooyoung was his sun, his moon, and all of his stars, all of his constellations to remember and the rings upon Saturn and the pretty colors of the Northern Lights in the nighttime to bask in.

The two were weird. They were paper mache, both spending nearly too much time rebuilding, gluing, building, gluing. But Wooyoung thinks it was worth it, to build up his paradise with him, to be able to call him home. And San, on the other hand, would do it 5 times over if he could.

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

“I love you, too, Bubs. Okay?”

San smiles, and Wooyoung breaks too, giggling into San’s mouth when he kisses him again.

_ “Okay.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that was it! thank you guys for all the nice things being said about this fic! i truly appreciate u! i know it's really not a big deal, it's just ff whatever, but meeting such nice people and hearing good things about this was so encouraging and motivating like??? i love yall???
> 
> i know this was a pHAT read but thank u for sticking with her :((( i hope you liked this and the ending wasn't anything too bad. if i disappointed u i'll cry please let me know of anything that i could change about anything at all! see u soon! dm me or else >:|
> 
> \- love, mandi

**Author's Note:**

> my twitter is the same as my user for anyone that wants to be friends!
> 
> is this going okay so far? please tell me of any spelling mistakes bc i'm illiterate and can't catch em all
> 
> thank you!
> 
> \- love, mandi


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